Three Dots In Quotes

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita. Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, an initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.

Who knew three dots could make such a difference? Like everything else, a love or a wish or whatever, it was all in the way you read it.

There is a sweet little horror story that is only two sentences long: 'The last man on Earth sat along in a room. There was a knock at the door…' Two sentences and an ellipsis of three dots. The horror, of course, isn't in the story at all; it's in the ellipsis, the implication: what knocked at the door. Faced with the unknown, the human mind supplies something vaguely horrible.

There are three things that robots cannot do," wrote Maxon. Then beneath that on the page he wrote three dots, indented. Beside the first dot he wrote "Show preference without reason (LOVE)" and then "Doubt rational decisions (REGRET)" and finally "Trust data from a previously unreliable source (FORGIVE).

Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.

She took off her dark glasses and squinted at me. It was as though her eyes were shattered prisms, the dots of blue and gray and green like broken bits of sparkle.

I recently heard of someone studying the ellipsis (or three dots) for a PhD. And, I have to say, I was horrified. The ellipsis is the black hole of the punctuation universe, surely, into which no right-minded person would willingly be sucked, for three years, with no guarantee of a job at the end.

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.

It can be really painful to have to face how fucked up shit is and how scared people are…of being alive. Scared of things that are amazing. Scared of things that aren’t like television or aren’t dead. A lot of people can’t deal with three-dimensional human beings, they only know how to deal with other products — they see themselves as other products. When the world only treats you like a dot on a marketing scheme, you can learn to treat yourself and other people like that.

From around the age of six, I had the habit of sketching from life. I became an artist, and from fifty on began producing works that won some reputation, but nothing I did before the age of seventy was worthy of attention. At seventy-three, I began to grasp the structures of birds and beasts, insects and fish, and of the way plants grow. If I go on trying, I will surely understand them still better by the time I am eighty-six, so that by ninety I will have penetrated to their essential nature. At one hundred, I may well have a positively divine understanding of them, while at one hundred and thirty, forty, or more I will have reached the stage where every dot and every stroke I paint will be alive. May Heaven, that grants long life, give me the chance to prove that this is no lie.

It was a stick-figure drawing. Two people holding hands. A thin man in black and a girl, half his height with short hair, and wide eyes. The stick-girl’s head was cocked slightly, and a small red spot marked her arm. Three similar spots, no bigger than periods, dotted the stick-man’s chest. The stick-man’s mouth was nothing more than a faint grim line. Beneath the drawing ran a single sentence: I made a friend.

Hey, you're kind of adorable. Hey. So are you. There's a soft knock on my door. One sex! Someone's here. OMG, YOU PERVY IPHONE. Sec. Not sex. TOO LATE! he writes. Three dots. Does this count as sexting? I think so?

A coherent life is one lived in such a way that you can clearly connect the dots between three things: who you are, what you believe, what you are doing.

History is ending because the dominator culture has led the human species into a blind alley, and as the inevitable chaostrophie approaches, people look for metaphors and answers. Every time a culture gets into trouble it casts itself back into the past looking for the last sane moment it ever knew. And the last sane moment we ever knew was on the plains of Africa 15,000 years ago rocked in the cradle of the Great Horned Mushroom Goddess before history, before standing armies, before slavery and property, before warfare and phonetic alphabets and monotheism, before, before, before. And this is where the future is taking us because the secret faith of the twentieth century is not modernism, the secret faith of the twentieth century is nostalgia for the archaic, nostalgia for the paleolithic, and that gives us body piercing, abstract expressionism, surrealism, jazz, rock-n-roll and catastrophe theory. The 20th century mind is nostalgic for the paradise that once existed on the mushroom dotted plains of Africa where the plant-human symbiosis occurred that pulled us out of the animal body and into the tool-using, culture-making, imagination-exploring creature that we are. And why does this matter? It matters because it shows that the way out is back and that the future is a forward escape into the past. This is what the psychedelic experience means. Its a doorway out of history and into the wiring under the board in eternity. And I tell you this because if the community understands what it is that holds it together the community will be better able to streamline itself for flight into hyperspace because what we need is a new myth, what we need is a new true story that tells us where we're going in the universe and that true story is that the ego is a product of pathology, and when psilocybin is regularly part of the human experience the ego is supressed and the supression of the ego means the defeat of the dominators, the materialists, the product peddlers. Psychedelics return us to the inner worth of the self, to the importance of the feeling of immediate experience - and nobody can sell that to you and nobody can buy it from you, so the dominator culture is not interested in the felt presence of immediate experience, but that's what holds the community together. And as we break out of the silly myths of science, and the infantile obsessions of the marketplace what we discover through the psychedelic experience is that in the body, IN THE BODY, there are Niagaras of beauty, alien beauty, alien dimensions that are part of the self, the richest part of life. I think of going to the grave without having a psychedelic experience like going to the grave without ever having sex. It means that you never figured out what it is all about. The mystery is in the body and the way the body works itself into nature. What the Archaic Revival means is shamanism, ecstacy, orgiastic sexuality, and the defeat of the three enemies of the people. And the three enemies of the people are hegemony, monogamy and monotony! And if you get them on the run you have the dominators sweating folks, because that means your getting it all reconnected, and getting it all reconnected means putting aside the idea of separateness and self-definition through thing-fetish. Getting it all connected means tapping into the Gaian mind, and the Gaian mind is what we're calling the psychedelic experience. Its an experience of the living fact of the entelechy of the planet. And without that experience we wander in a desert of bogus ideologies. But with that experience the compass of the self can be set, and that's the idea; figuring out how to reset the compass of the self through community, through ecstatic dance, through psychedelics, sexuality, intelligence, INTELLIGENCE. This is what we have to have to make the forward escape into hyperspace.

Three dot, a trinity, a way to map the universe, three dot.

I detected instantly that she didn’t like me. It’s a fact of life that a girl can tell in a flash if another girl likes her. Feely says that there is a broken telephone connection between men and women, and we can never know which of us rang off. With a boy you never know whether he’s smitten or gagging, but with a girl you can tell in the first three seconds. Between girls there is a silent and unending flow of invisible signals, like the high frequency wireless messages between the shore and the ships at sea, and this secret flow of dots and dashes was signalling that Mary detesting me.

I believe that no great lyric poet ever speaks in the so-called “proper” language of his or her time. Emily Dickinson didn’t write in “proper” English grammar but in slant music of fragmentary perception. Half a world and half a century away, Cesar Vallejo placed three dots in the middle of the line, as if language itself were not enough, as if the poet’s voice needed to leap from one image to another, to make—to use Eliot’s phrase—a raid on the inarticulate. Paul Celan wrote to his wife from Germany, where he briefly visited from his voluntary exile in France: “The language with which I make my poems has nothing to do with one spoken here, or anywhere.

I have been in love with painting ever since I became conscious of it at the age of six. I drew some pictures I thought fairly good when I was fifty, but really nothing I did before the age of seventy was of any value at all. At seventy-three I have at last caught every aspect of nature–birds, fish, animals, insects, trees, grasses, all. When I am eighty I shall have developed still further and I will really master the secrets of art at ninety. When I reach a hundred my work will be truly sublime and my final goal will be attained around the age of one hundred and ten, when every line and dot I draw will be imbued with life. - from Hokusai’s ‘The Art Crazy Old Man

Ever since he repented of religion and shaved off his clerical beard and mustache, he has had the constant feeling that he has taken off his trousers, and that his nose protrudes altogether indecently and must at all cost be covered. It's sheer torment! With one hand over his nose, the deacon knocks again and again. No one responds. And yet Martha is home; the gate is locked from within. And that means - what? It means that she is with someone else... The deacon punctuates the scene inwardly with the three dots we have graphically depicted just above, and, tripping over them at every second step, he proceeds to Rosa Luxemburg Street. ("X")

What is the only city with three dotted letters in a row?” Willo interrupted. “Beijing,” Angelo laughed.

Three butterflies for a broken girl: one for personality, one for possession, and one for pettiness

Dorothy Parker once said: I require three things in a man. He must be handsome, ruthless, and stupid.” Upon delivering this Dot bon mot, with much waving of sparkly rings and jingly bracelets, Constance Langtry comments that she’d add a fourth: “Deft tongue. And I don’t mean a good talker.

I brought the newspaper close up to my eyes to get a better view of George Pollucci's face, spotlighted like a three-quarter moon against a vague background of brick and black sky. I felt he had something important to tell me, and that whatever it was might just be written on his face. But the smudgy crags of George Pollucci's features melted away as I peered at them, and resolved themselves into a regular pattern of dark and light and medium gray dots. The inky black newspaper paragraph didn't tell why Mr Pollucci was on the ledge, or what Sgt Kilmartin did to him when he finally got him in through the window.

Things accumulated in purses. Unless they were deliberately unloaded and all contents examined for utility occasionally, one could find oneself transporting around in one's daily life three lipstick cases with just a crumb of lipstick left, an old eyebrow pencil sharpener without a blade, pieces of defunct watch, odd earrings, handkerchiefs (three crumpled, one uncrumpled), two grubby powder puffs, bent hairpins, patterns of ribbon to be matched, a cigarette lighter without fuel (and two with fuel), a spark plug, some papers of Bex and a sprinkling of loose white aspirin, eleven train tickets (the return half of which had not been given up), four tram tickets, cinema and theatre stubs, seven pence three farthings in loose change and the mandatory throat lozenge stuck to the lining. At least, those had been the extra contents of Phyrne's bag the last time Dot had turned it out.

I have drawn things since I was six. All that I made before the age of sixty-five is not worth counting. At seventy-three I began to understand the true construction of animals, plants, trees, birds, fishes, and insects. At ninety I will enter into the secret of things. At a hundred and ten, everything--every dot, every dash--will live

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.

History, lie of our lives, mire of our loins. Our sins, our souls. Hiss-tih-ree: the tip of the pen taking a trip of three steps (with one glide) down the chronicle to trap a slick, sibilant character. Hiss. (Ss.) Tih. Ree. He was a pig, a plain pig, in the morning, standing five feet ten on one hoof. He was a pig in slacks. He was a pig in school. He was a pig on the dotted line. But in my eyes it’s always the ones signing dotted lines that become pigs. Did this pig have a precursor? He did, indeed he did. In point of fact, dating all the way back to the Biblical Age. Oh where? About everywhere you look there's pigs giving that fancy ol’ snake a chase. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you can always count on a fuckin’ pretentious sarcastican for a fancy prose style.

The insanity of the human race had reached its historical zenith. The Cold War was at its height. Nuclear missiles capable of destroying the Earth ten times over could be launched at a moment’s notice, spread out among the countless missile silos dotting two continents and hidden within ghostlike nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines patrolling deep under the sea. A single Lafayette- or Yankee-class submarine held enough warheads to destroy hundreds of cities and kill hundreds of millions, but most people continued their lives as if nothing was wrong. As an astrophysicist, Ye was strongly against nuclear weapons. She knew this was a power that should belong only to the stars. She knew also that the universe had even more terrible forces: black holes, antimatter, and more. Compared to those forces, a thermonuclear bomb was nothing but a tiny candle. If humans obtained mastery over one of those other forces, the world might be vaporized in a moment. In the face of madness, rationality was powerless. *

As it moves closer, Galen can make out smaller bodies within the mass. Whales. Sharks. Sea turtles. Stingrays. And he knows exactly what’s happening. The darkening horizon engages the full attention of the Aerna; the murmurs grow louder the closer it gets. The darkness approaches like a mist, eclipsing the natural snlight from the surface. An eclipse of fish. With each of his rapid heartbeats, Galen thinks he can feel the actual years disappear from his life span. A wall of every predator imaginable, and every kind of prey swimming in between, fold themselves around the edges of the hot ridges. The food chain hovers toward, over them, around them as a unified force. And Emma is leading it. Nalia gasps, and Galen guesses she recognizes the white dot in the middle of the wall. Syrena on the outskirts of the Arena frantically rush to the center, the tribunal all but forgotten in favor of self-preservation. The legion of sea life circles the stadium, effectively barricading the exits and any chance of escaping. Galen can’t decide if he’s proud or angry when Emma leaves the safety of her troops to enter the Arena, hitching a ride on the fin of a killer whale. When she’s but three fin-lengths away from Galen, she dismisses her escort. “Go back with the others,” she tells it. “I’ll be fine.” Galen decides on proud. Oh, and completely besotted. She gives him a curt nod to which he grins. Turning to the crowd of ogling Syrena, she says, “I am Emma, daughter of Nalia, true princess of Poseidon.” He hears murmurs of “Half-Breed” but it sounds more like awe than hatred or disgust. And why shouldn’t it? They’ve seen Paca’s display of the Gift. Emma’s has just put it to shame.

So on we tramped, three small dots on a big mountain, mere specks, beings of no importance. In creating this world, God showed that he was a great mathematician; but in creating man, he got his algebra wrong. Puffed up with self-importance, we are in fact the most dispensable of all his creatures.

the human mind works in three elementary phases: saturate, incubate, and illuminate. Time allows us to saturate our mind with context, so we can incubate and spark the eureka moments of illumination that connect the dots, snap together patterns, and discover the options that allow us to find our paths.

One team even managed to present a pattern of light to fetuses through the wall of the uterus.21 Surprisingly, the researchers showed that three dots arranged in the shape of a face () attracted the fetus more than three dots arranged in the shape of a pyramid (). Face recognition seems to start in utero!

A figure barred their way. It hadn’t been there a moment ago but it looked permanent now. It seemed to have been made of snow, three balls of snow piled on one another. It had black dots for eyes. A semi-circle of more dots formed the semblance of a mouth. There was a carrot for the nose. And, for the arms, two twigs. At this distance, anyway. One of them was holding a curved stick. A raven wearing a damp piece of red paper landed on one arm. ‘Bob bob bob?’ it suggested. ‘Merry Solstice? Tweetie tweet? What are you waiting for? Hogswatch?’ The dogs backed away. The snow broke off the snowman in chunks, revealing a gaunt figure in a flapping black robe. Death spat out the carrot. HO. HO. HO.

Dipsy do and Dipsy be. How many dots does Dipsy need to connect the dots, one, two, three.

Sa me teper te dine njerezit per njeri-tjetrin, aq me shume keqkuptohen. Dhe sa me shume qe njihen me shoqi-shoqin, aq me te huaj behen. Ja, merre si shembull familjen Haze: ata ia dine te gjitha njeri-tjetrit dhe nuk honepsen dot, a thua se jane te huaj dhe shkuar te huajve. Ajo vuri ne koke kapen e vogel dhe e provoi perpara pasqyres. - Keto qe po rrefen ti Robi, jane gjysme te verteta. - Te gjitha te vertetat kete te mete kane, - iu pergjigja une. - Me tej s'arrijne dot kurre. Prandaj jemi njerez. Si do t'i vinte halli me te vertetat e plota? S'do te jetonim dot!

How all occasions do inform against me, And spur my dull revenge! What is a man, If his chief good and market of his time Be but to sleep and feed? a beast, no more. Sure, he that made us with such large discourse, Looking before and after, gave us not That capability and god-like reason To fust in us unused. Now, whether it be Bestial oblivion, or some craven scruple Of thinking too precisely on the event, A thought which, quarter'd, hath but one part wisdom And ever three parts coward, I do not know Why yet I live to say 'This thing's to do;' Sith I have cause and will and strength and means To do't. Examples gross as earth exhort me: Witness this army of such mass and charge Led by a delicate and tender prince, Whose spirit with divine ambition puff'd

Kya stood and walked into the night, into the creamy light of a three-quarter moon. The marsh’s soft air fell silklike around her shoulders. The moonlight chose an unexpected path through the pines, laying shadows about in rhymes. She strolled like a sleepwalker as the moon pulled herself naked from the waters and climbed limb by limb through the oaks. The slick mud of the lagoon shore glowed in the intense light, and hundreds of fireflies dotted the woods. Wearing a secondhand white dress with a flowing skirt and waving her arms slowly about, Kya waltzed to the music of katydids and leopard frogs.

The more I say the more remains to be said … as soon as I speak it becomes quite clear that, no matter how long I speak, new chasms open. No matter what I say I always have to leave three dots at the end. Whatever description I give always opens the doors to something further, something even darker, perhaps, but certainly something which is in principle incapable of being reduced to precise, clear, verifiable, objective prose.

If you think looking at three hundred boiling-mad, half-cocked Virginians holding every kind of breechloader under God’s sun staring back at you with murder in their eyes is a ticket to redemption, you is on the dot.

He withdrew the paper and unfolded it gingerly. It was a stick figure drawing. Two people holding hands. A man in black and a girl, half his height with short hair, and wide eyes. The stick-girl's head was cocked slightly, and a small red spot marked her arm. Three similar spots, no bigger than periods, dotted the stick-man's chest. The stick-man's mouth was nothing more than a faint grim line. Beneath the drawing ran a single sentence:

Skinny as Mum was, she'd always had a good appetite, so when she couldn't eat her roast potatoes I knew the end must be nigh. [...] We opened our presents and Mum put a polka-dot shower cap on her head and let us take pictures of her in it, which was most unlike her, she liked to be a bit dignified about things. This was another indication that she knew she was dying. Other signs to look out for are when an elderly person starts giving away their things – usually about two or three years before they die – and if they insist, rather aggressively, on returning anything they've borrowed or get annoyed if you give them gifts – they don't want any more clutter.

As children, we fear the dark. Anything might be out. here. The unknown troubles us. Ironically, it is our fate to live in the dark. This unexpected finding of science is only about three centuries old. Head out from the Earth in any direction you choose, and—after an initial flash of blue and a longer wait while the Sun fades—you are surrounded by blackness, punctuated only here and there by the faint and distant stars. Even after we are grown, the darkness retains its power to frighten us. And so there are those who say we should not inquire too closely into who else might be living in that darkness. Better not to know, they say. There are 400 billion stars in the Milky Way Galaxy. Of this immense multitude, could it be that our humdrum Sun is the only one with an inhabited planet? Maybe. Maybe the origin of life or intelligence is exceedingly improbable. Or maybe civilizations arise all the time, but wipe themselves out as soon as they are able. Or, here and there, peppered across space, orbiting other suns, maybe there are worlds something like our own, on which other beings gaze up and wonder as we do about who else lives in the dark…Life is a comparative rarity. You can survey dozens of worlds and find that on only one of them does life arise and evolve and persist… If we humans ever go to these worlds, then, it will be because a nation or a consortium of them believes it to be to its advantage—or to the advantage of the human species… In our time we’ve crossed the Solar System and sent four ships to the stars… But we continue to search for inhabitants. We can’t help it. Life looks for life.

I went back every evening, after work, for nearly a year. I learned the meaning of the cud of a leaf and the glisten of wet pebbles, and the special significance of curves and angles. A great deal of the writing was unwritten. Plot three dots on a graph and join them; you now have a curve with certain characteristics. Extend that curve while maintaining the characteristics, and it has meaning, up where no dots were plotted. In just this way I learned to extend the curve of a grass-blade and of a protruding root, of the bent edges of wetness on a drying headstone. I quit smoking so I could sharpen my sense of smell, because the scent of earth after a rain has a clarifying effect on graveyard reading, as if the page were made whiter and the ink darker. I began to listen to the wind, and to the voices of birds and small animals, insects and people; because to the educated ear, every sound is filtered through the story written on graves, and becomes a part of it. ("The Graveyard Reader")

I say is someone in there?’ The voice is the young post-New formalist from Pittsburgh who affects Continental and wears an ascot that won’t stay tight, with that hesitant knocking of when you know perfectly well someone’s in there, the bathroom door composed of thirty-six that’s three times a lengthwise twelve recessed two-bevelled squares in a warped rectangle of steam-softened wood, not quite white, the bottom outside corner right here raw wood and mangled from hitting the cabinets’ bottom drawer’s wicked metal knob, through the door and offset ‘Red’ and glowering actors and calendar and very crowded scene and pubic spirals of pale blue smoke from the elephant-colored rubble of ash and little blackened chunks in the foil funnel’s cone, the smoke’s baby-blanket blue that’s sent her sliding down along the wall past knotted washcloth, towel rack, blood-flower wallpaper and intricately grimed electrical outlet, the light sharp bitter tint of a heated sky’s blue that’s left her uprightly fetal with chin on knees in yet another North American bathroom, deveiled, too pretty for words, maybe the Prettiest Girl Of All Time (Prettiest G.O.A.T.), knees to chest, slew-footed by the radiant chill of the claw-footed tub’s porcelain, Molly’s had somebody lacquer the tub in blue, lacquer, she’s holding the bottle, recalling vividly its slogan for the past generation was The Choice of a Nude Generation, when she was of back-pocket height and prettier by far than any of the peach-colored titans they’d gazed up at, his hand in her lap her hand in the box and rooting down past candy for the Prize, more fun way too much fun inside her veil on the counter above her, the stuff in the funnel exhausted though it’s still smoking thinly, its graph reaching its highest spiked prick, peak, the arrow’s best descent, so good she can’t stand it and reaches out for the cold tub’s rim’s cold edge to pull herself up as the white- party-noise reaches, for her, the sort of stereophonic precipice of volume to teeter on just before the speaker’s blow, people barely twitching and conversations strettoing against a ghastly old pre-Carter thing saying ‘We’ve Only Just Begun,’ Joelle’s limbs have been removed to a distance where their acknowledgement of her commands seems like magic, both clogs simply gone, nowhere in sight, and socks oddly wet, pulls her face up to face the unclean medicine-cabinet mirror, twin roses of flame still hanging in the glass’s corner, hair of the flame she’s eaten now trailing like the legs of wasps through the air of the glass she uses to locate the de-faced veil and what’s inside it, loading up the cone again, the ashes from the last load make the world's best filter: this is a fact. Breathes in and out like a savvy diver… –and is knelt vomiting over the lip of the cool blue tub, gouges on the tub’s lip revealing sandy white gritty stuff below the lacquer and porcelain, vomiting muddy juice and blue smoke and dots of mercuric red into the claw-footed trough, and can hear again and seems to see, against the fire of her closed lids’ blood, bladed vessels aloft in the night to monitor flow, searchlit helicopters, fat fingers of blue light from one sky, searching.

1) The Titanic hit the iceberg in the North Atlantic, approximately 400 miles off the coast of Newfoundland. 2) The Titanic was considered unsinkable because she was built with huge watertight doors to contain any possible leaks. However, when the ship hit the iceberg, six watertight compartments quickly filled up with water, dooming the ship. 3) The signal SOS was chosen as an international distress call because of the simplicity of the three letters in Morse code: three dots, three dashes, and three dots. 4) No one knows for certain exactly how long the musicians played on the Titanic, but legend says they played until the ship went down, and their last song was the hymn “Nearer My God to Thee.” 5) More than 1,500 people perished in the Titanic disaster, while 705 people escaped in lifeboats and were eventually rescued by a ship named the Carpathia. 6) After the sinking of the Titanic, laws were changed so that every ship was required to have enough lifeboats to carryall its passengers. Also, the International Ice Patrol was formed, so that ships would have warning about ice conditions. 7) In 1985, a scientist named Dr. Robert Ballard discovered the undersea wreck of the Titanic.

Doesn’t water still come up through the tap?” she asked. “Capitalism marches on, Dot. What good is free water when you can pay a hotel three dollars a bottle?” “And people are okay with this?” “Of course. America’s love affair with commerce never cools.” “If you tell me they’re still reading Ayn Rand I may spit.

Look, cell phone geolocation data shows very few clustering anomalies for this hour and climate. And that’s holding up pretty much across all major metro areas. It’s gone down six percentage points since news of the Karachi workshop hit the Web, and it’s trending downward. If people are protesting, they aren’t doing it in the streets.” He circled his finger over a few clusters of dots. “Some potential protest knots in Portland and Austin, but defiance-related tag cloud groupings in social media put us within the three-sigma rule—meaning roughly sixty-eight percent of the values lie within one standard deviation of the mean.

The entire area - some 300 square kilometers - is sacred. There are shrines and temples dotted about the slopes, but they merely confirm the sanctity of the land. It is not in the shrines and temples that the gods live, but in the mountains themselves. [about the Three Holy Mountains of Dewa - Haguro, Gassam, and Yodono]

Observe the patterns of mistakes to see if they are products of weaknesses. Everyone has weaknesses and they are generally revealed in the patterns of mistakes they make. The fastest path to success starts with knowing what your weaknesses are and staring hard at them. Start by writing down your mistakes and connecting the dots between them. Then write down your “one big challenge,” the weakness that stands the most in the way of your getting what you want. Everyone has at least one big challenge. You may in fact have several, but don’t go beyond your “big three.” The first step to tackling these impediments is getting them out into the open.

Sister Gee stared at her neighbors as they surrounded her, and at that moment she saw them as she had never seen them before: they were crumbs, thimbles, flecks of sugar powder on a cookie, invisible, sporadic dots on the grid of promise, occasionally appearing on Broadway stages or on baseball teams with slogans like “You gotta believe,” when in fact there was nothing to believe but that one colored in the room is fine, two is twenty, and three means close up shop and everybody go home; all living the New York dream in the Cause Houses, within sight of the Statue of Liberty, a gigantic copper reminder that this city was a grinding factory that diced the poor man’s dreams worse than any cotton gin or sugarcane field from the old country. And

She looks across the line and sees the nine waitresses in their bathing suits, in the clear blazing sunlight, laughing on the dock, herself among them; and off in the shadowy rustling bushes of the shoreline, sex lurking dangerously. It had been dangerous, then. It had been sin. Forbidden, secret, sullying. Sick with desire. Three dots had expressed it perfectly, because there had been no ordinary words for it. On the other hand there had been marriage, which meant wifely checked aprons, playpens, a sugary safety. But nothing has turned out that way. Sex has been domesticated, stripped of the promised mystery, added to the category of the merely expected. It's just what is done, mundane as hockey. It's celibacy these days that would raise eyebrows.

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul, my Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.

you can easily substitute your favorite seafood, shrimp, scallops, or any mild white fish also works well. Sometimes I like to mix all three, for a seafood medley! Lazy Lobster Casserole 1 pound fresh lobster meat, chopped into roughly 1 inch pieces 1 stick of butter 1 sleeve of Ritz crackers 2 tablespoons sherry (optional) 2 tablespoons chopped, fresh, flat parsley Melt 3/4 stick of butter in a small bowl.  In a medium casserole dish, place lobster, and pour half the melted butter over and stir to coat.  Add Ritz cracker crumbs and parsley to the remaining melted butter.  Mix well, and then pat over top of lobster meat, until evenly coated. Cut remaining butter into small pieces and dot over top of stuffing. Drizzle sherry evenly over the top, and bake for about 25 minutes at 300 degrees. Serves 3-4

Her small bedroom was decorated with cheerfully embroidered samplers, which she had stitched herself, and a shelf containing an intricate shellwork tableau. In her parlor, the chimneypiece was crammed with pottery owls, sheep, and dogs, and dishes painted with blue and white Chinoiserie fruits and flowers. Along the picture rail of one wall was an array of brightly colored plates. Dotted about the other walls were half a dozen seascape engravings showing varying climactic conditions, from violent tempest to glassy calm. To the rear was an enormous closet that she used as a storeroom, packed with bottled delicacies such as greengage plums in syrup, quince marmalade, nasturtium pickles, and mushroom catsup, which infused all three rooms with the sharp but tantalizing aromas of vinegar, fruit, and spices.

I saw this at about three o'clock in the morning, alone in my apartment, on a black-and-white set with lots of interference. White noise and snow. He seemed to be speaking directly at me, right out of the television set. For a moment I was disoriented, seized by panic; could a ghost embody itself through wavelengths, electronic dots, a picture tube? What are the dead, anyway, but waves and energy? Light shining from a dead star?

The doctor had installed a portal that connected Emily’s store to her house, allowing her to bypass her commute. The portal was sage green and had three golden dots painted on the side: Emily studied the dots. “Is that an upside-down ‘therefore’ symbol?” “When the dots are placed this way, they mean ‘because.’ I know my house is closer to town than yours. If you do ever decide to marry me,” Daedalus said, “I did not wish convenience to be a factor in your decision.

Life in the Cause would lurch forward as it always did. You worked, slaved, fought off the rats, the mice, the roaches, the ants, the Housing Authority, the cops, the muggers, and now the drug dealers. You lived a life of disappointment and suffering, of too-hot summers and too-cold winters, surviving in apartments with crummy stoves that didn’t work and windows that didn’t open and toilets that didn’t flush and lead paint that flecked off the walls and poisoned your children, living in awful, dreary apartments built to house Italians who came to America to work the docks, which had emptied of boats, ships, tankers, dreams, money, and opportunity the moment the colored and the Latinos arrived. And still New York blamed you for all its problems. And who can you blame? You were the one who chose to live here, in this hard town with its hard people, the financial capital of the world, land of opportunity for the white man and a tundra of spent dreams and empty promises for anyone else stupid enough to believe the hype. Sister Gee stared at her neighbors as they surrounded her, and at that moment she saw them as she had never seen them before: they were crumbs, thimbles, flecks of sugar powder on a cookie, invisible, sporadic dots on the grid of promise, occasionally appearing on Broadway stages or on baseball teams with slogans like “You gotta believe,” when in fact there was nothing to believe but that one colored in the room is fine, two is twenty, and three means close up shop and everybody go home; all living the New York dream in the Cause Houses, within sight of the Statue of Liberty, a gigantic copper reminder that this city was a grinding factory that diced the poor man’s dreams worse than any cotton gin or sugarcane field from the old country. And now heroin was here to make their children slaves again, to a useless white powder. She looked them over, the friends of her life, staring at her. They saw what she saw, she realized. She read it in their faces. They would never win. The game was fixed. The villains would succeed. The heroes would die.

I’ll be waiting outside. Why? The dots bounced on the screen and she bit her lip, curious what his intentions were. Because I’ve waited three days already. Dots. Because I’m trying not to crowd you. Dots. Because I can’t wait until the day after. Dots. Because I missed you. Dots. Because I love talking with you. Dots. Because I get hard when I think about you. Dots. Because waiting is what I am willing to do until you see me as who I am now, not who I was then. Dots. Because you are worth every fucking hoop you ask me to jump through.

Stell handed Eli a plastic bag. Inside was a crumpled piece of paper. He withdrew the paper and unfolded it gingerly. It was a stick-figure drawing. Two people holding hands. A thin man in black and a girl, half his height with short hair, and wide eyes. The stick-girl's head was cocked slightly, and a small red spot marked her arm. Three similar spots, no bigger than periods, dotted the stick-man's chest. The stick-man's mouth was nothing more than a faint grim line. Beneath the drawing ran a single sentence: I made a friend. Victor.

Oh, but it is!" said Dot. "You see, I've taken many, many writing workshops. You'd be surprised how many." No I wouldn't, thought Amy, although she would be surprised if any of the other classes had actually encouraged critical reading. Dot was ideal prey for the sort of writing guru who praised everybody's use of metaphor whenever a metaphor, however exhausted, was actually used. No doubt Dot had been told more than once that her work was publishable, and Dot, hearing identical assurances given to others, had believed in her heart of hearts that she was the only one not being patronized. There was a local industry devoted to Dots: weekend writing conferences, during which the Dots could pay extra to have a real-live literary agent actually read one of their paragraphs; expensive weeklong retreats in Anza-Borrego or Julian or Ensenada, where the Dots could locate their inner voices; and at least three annual fiction-writing contests which the Dots could enter at will, for a hefty fee. Amy was willing to bet that in Dot's living room an entire wall was devoted to framed literary awards, including Third Runner-Up Best Unpublished Romance Manuscript.

Tyler was to his left, and to his right were the three other witnesses who had joined them for the headlining session of the first day of testimony. Directly next to Cameron sat Fred Wilson, a seasoned venture capitalist veteran who had moved into the cyber currency space in a big way, with the countenance of someone who had seen a number of technology waves, including the first dot-com boom and bust. Next to Wilson, the up-and-comer venture capitalist Jeremy Liew, a partner at Lightspeed Venture. And at the end of the bench, Barry Silbert, the founder and CEO of the startup SecondMarket.

I begin to describe a three-tier cake. The bottom tier would be a deep, dark devil's food cake filled with thick chocolate custard. The middle tier would be a vanilla cake filled with a fluffy vanilla mousse and a layer of roasted strawberries. The top tier, designed to be removed whole and frozen for the first anniversary, would be one layer of chocolate cake and one of vanilla with a strawberry buttercream filling. The whole cake would be covered in a layer of vanilla buttercream, perfectly smoothed, and the tiers separated by a simple line of piped dots, looking like a string of pearls.

Mr. Today’s Clue: FOLLOW THE DOTS AS THE TRAVELING SUN, MAGNIFY, FOCUS, EVERY ONE. STAND ENROBED WHERE YOU FIRST SAW ME, UTTER IN ORDER; REPEAT TIMES THREE. SAM & LANI’S TAP SYSTEM: A=1 TAP B=2 TAPS C=3 TAPS D=4 TAPS E=5 TAPS OR 1 SLAP F=6 TAPS OR 1 SLAP 1 TAP G=7 OR 1 SLAP 2 TAPS H=8 OR 1 SLAP 3 TAPS I=9 OR 1 SLAP 4 TAPS J=10 OR 2 SLAPS K=11 OR 2 SLAPS 1 TAP L=12 OR 2 SLAPS 2 TAPS M=13 OR 2 SLAPS 3 TAPS N=14 OR 2 SLAPS 4 TAPS 0=15 OR 3 SLAPS p=16 OR 3 SLAPS 1 TAP Q=17 OR 3 SLAPS 2 TAPS R=18 OR 3 SLAPS 3 TAPS S=19 OR 3 SLAPS 4 TAPS T=20 OR 4 SLAPS U=21 OR 4 SLAPS 1 TAP V=22 OR 4 SLAPS 2 TAPS W=23 OR 4 SLAPS 3 TAPS X=24 OR 4 SLAPS 4 TAPS Y=25 OR 5 SLAPS Z=26 OR 5 SLAPS 1 TAP

I became an artist, and from fifty on began producing works that won some reputation, but nothing I did before the age of seventy was worthy of attention. At seventy-three, I began to grasp the structures of birds and beasts, insects and fish, and of the way plants grow. If I go on trying, I will surely understand them still better by the time I am eighty-six, so that by ninety I will have penetrated to their essential nature. At one hundred, I may well have a positively divine understanding of them, while at one-hundred and thirty, forty, or more I will have reached the stage where every dot and every stroke I paint will be alive. May Heaven, that grants long life, give me the chance to prove that this is no lie.

Now that is a sword,” Freddy said in awe as he went to look at an impressive saber hanging from the hat rack near the door. “Stay away from it,” she cautioned. “I’m sure it’s sharper than yours.” As usual, Freddy ignored her. “Just think what I could do with this,” he said as he lifted it off its hook. “So far I haven’t seen you do anything with a sword, my boy,” Oliver remarked dryly. “Though I shudder to think what your cousin would attempt.” Maria glared at Oliver, which only made him laugh. Meanwhile, Freddy unsheathed the saber with a flourish. “Curse it, Freddy, put it back,” Maria ordered. “What a fine piece of steel.” Freddy swished it through the air. “Even the one Uncle Adam gave me isn’t near so impressive.” Maria appealed to Oliver. “Do something, for pity’s sake. Make him stop.” “And get myself skewered for the effort? No, thank you. Let the pup have his fun.” Freddy cast him a belligerent glance. “You wouldn’t call me a pup if I came at you with this.” “No, I’d call you insane,” Oliver drawled. “But you’re welcome to try and see what happens.” Don’t encourage him,” Maria told Oliver. The door opened suddenly, and Freddy whirled with the sword in hand, knocking a lamp off the desk. As the glass chimney shattered, spilling oil in a wide arc, the wick lit the lot, and fire sprang to life. Maria jumped back with a cry of alarm while Oliver leaped out of his chair to stamp it out, first with his boots and then with his coat. A string of curses filled the air, most of them Oliver’s, though Freddy got in a few choice ones as the fire licked at his favorite trousers. When at last Oliver put the flames out and nothing was left but a charred circle on the wood floor, dotted with shards of glass, the three of them turned to the door to find a dark-haired man observing the scene with an expression that gave nothing away. “If you hoped to catch my attention,” he remarked, “you’ve succeeded.” “Mr. Pinter, I presume?” Oliver said, tossing his now ruined coat and singed gloves into a nearby rubbish pail. “I hope you’ll forgive us for the dramatic intrusion. I’m Stonevi-“ “I know who you are, my lord,” he interrupted. “It’s what you’re doing here setting fire to my office that I’m not certain of.

It was a stick-figure drawing. Two people holding hands. A thin man in black and a girl, half his height with short hair, and wide eyes. The stick-girl’s head was cocked slightly, and a small red spot marked her arm. Three similar spots, no bigger than periods, dotted the stick-man’s chest. The stick-man’s mouth was nothing more than a faint grim line. Beneath the drawing ran a single sentence: I made a friend. Victor. “You okay?” Eli blinked, felt the cop’s hand on his arm. He slid free, folded the paper, and put it in his pocket before anyone could see or say otherwise…Eli went back the way he’d come. He didn’t stop, not until he was safely in his car. In the relative privacy of the side street in Merit, he pressed his hand against the drawing in his pocket, and a phantom pain started in his stomach.

Devin was the most gorgeous, unique creature Kate had ever known. She'd come out of the womb an individual, refusing to be defined by anyone. She didn't even look like anyone on either side of their families. Matt's family was so proud of their dark hair, a blue-black that had been the envy of generations, the way it caught the sun like a spiderweb. From Kate's own side of the family, there was a gene that made their eyes so green that they could trick people into thinking that even the most unattractive Morris woman was pretty. And yet here was Devin, with fine cotton-yellow hair and light blue eyes, the left of which was a lazy eye. She'd had to wear an eye patch when she was three. And she'd loved it. She loved her knotted yellow hair. She loved wearing stripes with polka dots, and tutus, and pink and green socks with orange patent-leather shoes. Devin could care less what other people thought about her.

On the bus, I pull out my book. It's the best book I've ever read, even if I'm only halfway through. It's called Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, with two dots over the e. Jane Eyre lives in England in Queen Victoria's time. She's an orphan who's taken in by a horrid rich aunt who locks her in a haunted room to punish her for lying, even though she didn't lie. Then Jane is sent to a charity school, where all she gets to eat is burnt porridge and brown stew for many years. But she grows up to be clever, slender, and wise anyway. Then she finds work as a governess in a huge manor called Thornfield, because in England houses have names. At Thornfield, the stew is less brown and the people less simple. That's as far as I've gotten... Diving back into Jane Eyre... Because she grew up to be clever, slender and wise, no one calls Jane Eyre a liar, a thief or an ugly duckling again. She tutors a young girl, Adèle, who loves her, even though all she has to her name are three plain dresses. Adèle thinks Jane Eyre's smart and always tells her so. Even Mr. Rochester agrees. He's the master of the house, slightly older and mysterious with his feverish eyebrows. He's always asking Jane to come and talk to him in the evenings, by the fire. Because she grew up to be clever, slender, and wise, Jane Eyre isn't even all that taken aback to find out she isn't a monster after all... Jane Eyre soon realizes that she's in love with Mr. Rochester, the master of Thornfield. To stop loving him so much, she first forces herself to draw a self-portrait, then a portrait of Miss Ingram, a haughty young woman with loads of money who has set her sights on marrying Mr. Rochester. Miss Ingram's portrait is soft and pink and silky. Jane draws herself: no beauty, no money, no relatives, no future. She show no mercy. All in brown. Then, on purpose, she spends all night studying both portraits to burn the images into her brain for all time. Everyone needs a strategy, even Jane Eyre... Mr. Rochester loves Jane Eyre and asks her to marry him. Strange and serious, brown dress and all, he loves her. How wonderful, how impossible. Any boy who'd love a sailboat-patterned, swimsuited sausage who tames rabid foxes would be wonderful. And impossible. Just like in Jane Eyre, the story would end badly. Just like in Jane Eyre, she'd learn the boy already has a wife as crazy as a kite, shut up in the manor tower, and that even if he loves the swimsuited sausage, he can't marry her. Then the sausage would have to leave the manor in shame and travel to the ends of the earth, her heart in a thousand pieces... Oh right, I forgot. Jane Eyre returns to Thornfield one day and discovers the crazy-as-a-kite wife set the manor on fire and did Mr. Rochester some serious harm before dying herself. When Jane shows up at the manor, she discovers Mr. Rochester in the dark, surrounded by the ruins of his castle. He is maimed, blind, unkempt. And she still loves him. He can't believe it. Neither can I. Something like that would never happen in real life. Would it? ... You'll see, the story ends well.

(It’s a doozy! I could listen to it all day long.) Nikki Lane—“Gone, Gone, Gone,” “Coming Home to You” Patterson Hood—“Belvedere,” “Back of a Bible” Ryan Bingham—“Guess Who’s Knocking” American Aquarium—“Casualties” Devil Doll—“The Things You Make Me Do” American Aquarium—“I’m Not Going to the Bar” Hank Williams Jr.—“Family Tradition” David Allan Coe—“Mama Tried” John Paul Keith—“She’ll Dance to Anything” Carl Perkins—“Honey, Don’t” Scott H. Biram—“Lost Case of Being Found” The Cramps—“The Way I Walk” The Reverend Horton Heat—“Jimbo Song” Justin Townes Earle—“Baby’s Got a Bad Idea” Old Crow Medicine Show—“Wagon Wheel,” “Hard to Love” Dirty River Boys—“My Son” JD McPherson—“Wolf Teeth” Empress of Fur—“Mad Mad Bad Bad Mama” Dwight Yoakam—“Little Sister” The Meteors—“Psycho for Your Love” Hayes Carll—“Love Don’t Let Me Down” HorrorPops—“Dotted with Hearts” Buddy Holly—“Because I Love You” Chris Isaak—“Baby Did a Bad Bad Thing” Jason Isbell—“The Devil Is My Running Mate” Lindi Ortega—“When All the Stars Align” Three Bad Jacks—“Scars” Kasey Anderson and the Honkies—“My Blues, My Love

Back in January 2000, the newly rebuilt Hayden Planetarium in New York City featured a space show titled Passport to the Universe, which took visitors on a virtual zoom from the planetarium out to the edge of the cosmos. En route, the audience viewed Earth, then the solar system, then watched the hundred billion stars of the Milky Way galaxy shrink, in turn, to barely visible dots on the planetarium's dome. Within a month of opening day, I received a letter from an Ivy League professor of psychology whose expertise was in things that make people feel insignificant. I never knew one could specialize in such a field. He wanted to administer a before-and-after questionnaire to visitors, assessing the depth of their depression after viewing the show. Passport to the Universe, he wrote, elicited the most dramatic feelings of smallness and insignificance he had ever experienced. How could that be? Every time I see the space show (and others we've produced), I feel alive and spirited and connected. I also feel large, knowing that the goings-on within the three pound human brain are what enabled us to figure out our place in the universe.

The walls behind the counter had deep floor-to-ceiling shelves for vases and jam jars and scented candles, and there was an old wrought-iron revolving stand for cards. But most of the space in the long, narrow shop was taken up with flowers and plants. Today there were fifty-two kinds of cut blooms, from the tiny cobalt-blue violets that were smaller than Lara's little fingernail to a purple-and-green-frilled brassica that was bigger than her head. The flowers were set out in gleaming metal buckets and containers of every shape and size. They were lined up on the floor three deep and stacked on the tall three-tier stand in the middle of the shop. The plants, huge leafy ferns and tiny fleshy succulents, lemon trees and jasmine bushes and freckled orchids, were displayed on floating shelves that were built at various heights all the way up to the ceiling. Lara had spent weeks getting the lighting right. There were a few soft spotlights above the flower displays, and an antique crystal chandelier hung low above the counter. There were strings of fairy lights and dozens of jewel-colored tea lights and tall, slender lanterns dotted between the buckets. When they were lit, they cast star and crescent moon shapes along the walls and the shop resembled the courtyard of a Moroccan riad- a tiny walled garden right in the middle of the city.

THREE BIG MISTAKES. But, of course, it’s never that simple. Before we even got to the third one, we were down and done. As much as our willingness to believe in the constant rise felled us, as much as our eagerness to conquer risk opened us up to more risk, as much as Greenspan stood by as Wall Street turned itself into Las Vegas, there was also Greece, and Iceland, and Nick Leeson, who took down Barings, and Brian Hunter, who tanked Amaranth, and Jérôme Kerviel and every other rogue trader who thought he—and it was always a he—could reverse his gut-churning, self-induced free fall with one swift, lucky strike; it was rising oil prices, global inflation, easy credit, the cowardice of Moody’s, the growing chasm of income inequality, the dot com boom and bust, the Fed’s rejection of regulation, the acceptance of “too big to fail,” the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, the feast of subprime debt; it was Clinton and Bush the second and senators vacationing with banking industry lobbyists, the Kobe earthquake, an infatuation with financial innovation, the forgettable Hank Paulson, the delicious hubris of ten, twenty, thirty times leverage, and, at the bottom of it, our own vicious, lingering self-doubt. Or was it our own willful, unbridled self-delusion? Doubt vs. delusion. The flip sides of our last lucky coin. We toss it in the fountain and pray.

There followed a three-year spectacle during which [Senator Joseph] McCarthy captured enormous media attention by prophesying the imminent ruin of America and by making false charges that he then denied raising—only to invent new ones. He claimed to have identified subversives in the State Department, the army, think tanks, universities, labor unions, the press, and Hollywood. He cast doubt on the patriotism of all who criticized him, including fellow senators. McCarthy was profoundly careless about his sources of information and far too glib when connecting dots that had no logical link. In his view, you were guilty if you were or ever had been a Communist, had attended a gathering where a supposed Communist sympathizer was present, had read a book authored by someone soft on Communism, or subscribed to a magazine with liberal ideas. McCarthy, who was nicknamed Tailgunner Joe, though he had never been a tail gunner, was also fond of superlatives. By the middle of 1951, he was warning the Senate of “a conspiracy so immense and an infamy so black as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man.” McCarthy would neither have become a sensation, nor ruined the careers of so many innocent people, had he not received support from some of the nation’s leading newspapers and financing from right-wingers with deep pockets. He would have been exposed much sooner had his wild accusations not been met with silence by many mainstream political leaders from both parties who were uncomfortable with his bullying tactics but lacked the courage to call his bluff. By the time he self-destructed, a small number of people working in government had indeed been identified as security risks, but none because of the Wisconsin senator’s scattershot investigations. McCarthy fooled as many as he did because a lot of people shared his anxieties, liked his vituperative style, and enjoyed watching the powerful squirm. Whether his allegations were greeted with resignation or indignation didn’t matter so much as the fact that they were reported on and repeated. The more inflammatory the charge, the more coverage it received. Even skeptics subscribed to the idea that, though McCarthy might be exaggerating, there had to be some fire beneath the smoke he was spreading. This is the demagogue’s trick, the Fascist’s ploy, exemplified most outrageously by the spurious and anti-Jewish Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Repeat a lie often enough and it begins to sound as if it must—or at least might—be so. “Falsehood flies,” observed Jonathan Swift, “and the truth comes limping after it.” McCarthy’s career shows how much hysteria a skilled and shameless prevaricator can stir up, especially when he claims to be fighting in a just cause. After all, if Communism was the ultimate evil, a lot could be hazarded—including objectivity and conventional morality—in opposing it.

In Amsterdam, I took a room in a small hotel located in the Jordann District and after lunch in a café went for a walk in the western parts of the city. In Flaubert’s Alexandria, the exotic had collected around camels, Arabs peacefully fishing and guttural cries. Modern Amsterdam provided different but analogous examples: buildings with elongated pale-pink bricks stuck together with curiously white mortar, long rows of narrow apartment blocks from the early twentieth century, with large ground-floor windows, bicycles parked outside every house, street furniture displaying a certain demographic scruffiness, an absence of ostentatious buildings, straight streets interspersed with small parks…..In one street lines with uniform apartment buildings, I stopped by a red front door and felt an intense longing to spend the rest of my life there. Above me, on the second floor, I could see an apartment with three large windows and no curtains. The walls were painted white and decorated with a single large painting covered with small blue and red dots. There was an oaken desk against a wall, a large bookshelf and an armchair. I wanted the life that this space implied. I wanted a bicycle; I wanted to put my key in that red front door every evening. Why be seduced by something as small as a front door in another country? Why fall in love with a place because it has trams and its people seldom have curtains in their homes? However absurd the intense reactions provoked by such small (and mute) foreign elements my seem, the pattern is at least familiar from our personal lives. My love for the apartment building was based on what I perceived to be its modesty. The building was comfortable but not grand. It suggested a society attracted to the financial mean. There was an honesty in its design. Whereas front doorways in London are prone to ape the look of classical temples, in Amsterdam they accept their status, avoiding pillars and plaster in favor of neat, undecorated brick. The building was modern in the best sense, speaking of order, cleanliness, and light. In the more fugitive, trivial associations of the word exotic, the charm of a foreign place arises from the simple idea of novelty and change-from finding camels where at home there are horses, for example, or unadorned apartment buildings where at home there are pillared ones. But there may be a more profound pleasure as well: we may value foreign elements not only because they are new but because they seem to accord more faithfully with our identity and commitments than anything our homeland can provide. And so it was with my enthusiasms in Amsterdam, which were connected to my dissatisfactions with my own country, including its lack of modernity and aesthetic simplicity, its resistance to urban life and its net-curtained mentality. What we find exotic abroad may be what we hunger for in vain at home.

If you want the reader to feel intimately related to your subject, try a close-up shot. Describe the character, object or scene as if it were positioned directly in front of your eyes, close enough to touch. Let the reader see the hand-etched signature on the bottom of the wooden bowl or the white strip on the divorcée’s finger where a wedding ring once lay. Let him smell the heaviness of the milking barn after a night of rain, hear the squeak of the farmer’s rubber boots. If you want to get even closer, take the reader inside a character’s body and let him experience her world—the reeling nausea of Lydia’s first morning sickness, the tenderness of her breasts, the metallic taste in her mouth—from the inside out. Then, when you need to establish distance, to remove the reader from the scene as Shirley Jackson did in “The Lottery,” pull back. Describe your object from a great distance. The wooden bowl is no longer a hand-crafted, hand-signed original, or if it is, you can’t tell from where you’re standing. The pregnant woman is no longer Lydia-of-the-tender-breasts; she’s one of dozens of other faceless women seated in the waiting room of the county clinic. As you vary the physical distance between your describer and the subjects being described, you may find that your personal connection with your subjects is altered. Physical closeness often presages emotional closeness. Consider how it is possible that kind and loving men (like my father, who served in three wars) are capable of dropping bombs on “enemy” villages. One factor is their physical distance from their targets. The scene changes dramatically when they face a villager eye to eye; no longer is the enemy a tiny dot darting beneath the shadow of their planes, or a blip on the radar screen. No, this “enemy” has black hair flecked with auburn and a scar over her left eyebrow; she’s younger than the wives they left behind. If

Hubble then made an even more amazing discovery. By measuring the red shift of the stars’ spectra (which is the light wave counterpart to the Doppler effect for sound waves), he realized that the galaxies were moving away from us. There were at least two possible explanations for the fact that distant stars in all directions seemed to be flying away from us: (1) because we are the center of the universe, something that since the time of Copernicus only our teenage children believe; (2) because the entire metric of the universe was expanding, which meant that everything was stretching out in all directions so that all galaxies were getting farther away from one another. It became clear that the second explanation was the case when Hubble confirmed that, in general, the galaxies were moving away from us at a speed that was proportional to their distance from us. Those twice as far moved away twice as fast, and those three times as far moved away three times as fast. One way to understand this is to imagine a grid of dots that are each spaced an inch apart on the elastic surface of a balloon. Then assume that the balloon is inflated so that the surface expands to twice its original dimensions. The dots are now two inches away from each other. So during the expansion, a dot that was originally one inch away moved another one inch away. And during that same time period, a dot that was originally two inches away moved another two inches away, one that was three inches away moved another three inches away, and one that was ten inches away moved another ten inches away. The farther away each dot was originally, the faster it receded from our dot. And that would be true from the vantage point of each and every dot on the balloon. All of which is a simple way to say that the galaxies are not merely flying away from us, but instead, the entire metric of space, or the fabric of the cosmos, is expanding. To envision this in 3-D, imagine that the dots are raisins in a cake that is baking and expanding in all directions. On

Betsy didn’t want to be at the party any more than Cole did. She’d met the birthday girl in a spin class a couple of years earlier and had been declining her Evites ever since. In an effort to meet new people, however, this time Betsy replied “Yes.” She took a cab to the party, wondering why she was going at all. When Betsy met Cole there was a spark, but she was ambivalent. Cole was clearly smart and well educated, but he didn’t seem to be doing much about it. They had some nice dates, which seemed promising. Then, after sleeping over one night and watching Cole wake up at eleven a.m. and grab his skateboard, Betsy felt less bullish. She didn’t want to help another boyfriend grow up. What Betsy didn’t know was that, ever since he’d started spending time with her, Cole had regained some of his old drive. He saw the way she wanted to work on her sculptures even on the weekend, how she and her friends loved to get together to talk about their projects and their plans. As a result, Cole started to think more aspirationally. He eyed a posting for a good tech job at a high-profile start-up, but he felt his résumé was now too shabby to apply. As luck would have it—and it is often luck—Cole remembered that an old friend from high school, someone he bumped into about once every year or two, worked at the start-up. He got in touch, and this friend put in a good word to HR. After a handful of interviews with different people in the company, Cole was offered the position. The hiring manager told Cole he had been chosen for three reasons: His engineering degree suggested he knew how to work hard on technical projects, his personality seemed like a good fit for the team, and the twentysomething who vouched for him was well liked in the company. The rest, the manager said, Cole could learn on the job. This one break radically altered Cole’s career path. He learned software development at a dot-com on the leading edge. A few years later, he moved over and up as a director of development at another start-up because, by then, the identity capital he’d gained could speak for itself. Nearly ten years later, Cole and Betsy are married. She runs a gallery co-op. He’s a CIO. They have a happy life and gladly give much of the credit to Cole’s friend from high school and to the woman with the Evites.

Mathilde watched as down the street came a little girl in a red snowsuit with purple racing stripes. Mittens, a cap too big for her head. Disoriented, the girl turned around and around and around. She began to climb the snow mountain that blocked her from the street. But she was so weak. Halfway up, she’d slip back down. She’d try again, digging her feet deeper into the drift. Mathilde held her breath each time, let it out when the girl fell. She thought of a cockroach in a wineglass, trying to climb up the smooth sides. When Mathilde looked across the street at a long brick apartment complex taking up the whole block, ornate in its 1920s style, she saw, in scattered windows, three women watching the little girl’s struggles. Mathilde watched the women as they watched the girl. One was laughing over her bare shoulder at someone in the room, flushed with sex. One was elderly, drinking her tea. The third, sallow and pinched, had crossed her skinny arms and was pursing her lips. At last, the girl, exhausted, slid down and rested, her face against the snow. Mathilde was sure she was crying. When Mathilde looked up again, the woman with crossed arms was staring angrily through all the glass and cold and snow directly at her. Mathilde startled, sure she’d been invisible. The woman disappeared. She reappeared on the sidewalk in inside clothes, tweedy and thin. She chucked her body into the snowdrift in front of the apartment building, crossed the street, grabbed the girl by the mittens and swung her over the mountain. Carried her across the street and did it again. Both mother and daughter were powdered with white when they went inside. Long after they were gone, Mathilde thought of the woman. What she was imagining when she saw her little girl fall and fall and fall. She wondered at the kind of anger that would crumple your heart up so hard that you could watch a child struggle and fail and weep for so long, without moving to help. Mothers, Mathilde had always known, were people who abandoned you to struggle alone. It occurred to her then that life was conical in shape, the past broadening beyond the sharp point of the lived moment. The more life you had, the more the base expanded, so that the wounds and treasons that were nearly imperceptible when they happened stretched like tiny dots on a balloon slowly blown up. A speck on the slender child grows into a gross deformity in the adult, inescapable, ragged at the edges. A

Sometimes we ate raw onions like apples, too, I wanted to tell her. Sometimes, the tin foil held shredded chicken petrified in aspic. A fish head to suck on! I was filled with shame and hateful glee: everything I was feeling turned out at the person next to me. I was the one with an uncut cow's tongue uncoiling in the refrigerator of his undergraduate quad, my roommates' Gatorades and half-finished pad Thai keeping a nervous distance. I sliced it thinly, and down it went with horseradish and cold vodka like the worry of a long day sloughing off, those little dots of fat between the cold meet like garlic roasted to paste. I am the one who fried liver. Who brought his own lunch in an old Tupperware to his cubicle in the Conde Nast Building; who accidentally warmed it too long, and now the scent of buckwheat, stewed chicken, and carrots hung like radiation over the floor, few of those inhabitants brought lunch from home, fewer of whom were careless enough to heat it for too long if they did, and none of whom brought a scent bomb in the first place. Fifteen floors below, the storks who staffed the fashion magazines grazed on greens in the Frank Gehry cafeteria. I was the one who ate mashed potatoes and frankfurters for breakfast. Who ate a sandwich for breakfast. Strange? But Americans ate cereal for dinner. Americans ate cereal, period, that oddment. They had a whole thing called 'breakfast for dinner.' And the only reason they were right and I was wrong was that it was their country. The problem with my desire to pass for native was that everything in the tinfoil was so f*****g good. When the world thinks of Soviet food, it thinks of all the wrong things. Though it was due to incompetence rather than ideology, we were local, seasonal, and organic long before Chez Panisse opened its doors. You just had to have it in a home instead of a restaurant, like British cooking after the war, as Orwell wrote. For me, the food also had cooked into it the memory of my grandmother's famine; my grandfather's black-marketeering to get us the 'deficit' goods that, in his view, we deserved no less than the political VIPs; all the family arguments that paused while we filled our mouths and our eyes rolled back in our heads. Food was so valuable that it was a kind of currency - and it was how you showed loved. If, as a person on the cusp of thirty, I wished to find sanity, I had to figure out how to temper this hunger without losing hold of what it fed, how to retain a connection to my past without being consumed by its poison.

I didn't want to risk taking Samuel out again. I had already pushed the law enough since arriving here. So, I found myself heading up to Lee's room. I sat in front of his computer, which had been left unlocked, then navigated to the map of Patrus and stared at the five red moving dots. I could guess which one Viggo was—he was already at his gym. I wondered what he was practicing now. Whether he even had a trainer, or if he always prepared for fights on his own. Then I found myself watching the other four dots and wondering who those people were. One of them was roaming the outskirts of the city, while the other three were near the city center, the latter, like Viggo, pretty stationary.

The man at the keyboard frowned. The green dot moved with the car, miles away. I watched the three detectives glued to the screen. This, I thought, is the police work of the future

Here you are, a breathing being on this spinning blue dot, a safe haven for human life in a universe estimated to be about ninety-three billion light-years in diameter and growing. Here we are, the two of us, connected in this moment, sitting here among perhaps two trillion galaxies, breathing this beautiful breath, intricately linked, shared energy flowing in, out, and through us.

Today I've prepared a dish I'm calling 'Sea Bass of Three.' The first is a citrus ceviche with yellow chilies and a hint of preserved lemon, to be eaten with plantain crisps on the left of your plate." Even from her vantage, Penelope could see Elijah had molded the ceviche into a vague fish shape that pointed to the center of the plate. "Next, in the center, is a pan-sautéed fillet of sea bass coated in chili de árbol, and paprika potatoes sliced and arranged to resemble fish scales," Elijah continued. Penelope's mouth watered at the sight of the fillet, which looked perfectly crisp and very much resembled a small fish. It again seemed to point to the third and final part of the dish, thanks to the way he'd arranged it all. "And for the final phase, you have a sea-bass-and-cod fritter with fresh coriander leaves, serrano chilies, and a pineapple, chili, and lime foam." The queen and the princess nodded and started to eat the ceviche. "Will you explain what you've done with the samphire?" Lady Rutland asked, pointing to the green seaweed that resembled very thin asparagus spears. "The samphire is meant to symbolize the sea, just as the pineapple foam is meant to suggest sea foam. I sautéed the samphire in a spiced butter," Elijah replied. Penelope grinned from her seat behind the Minstrels' Gallery's open door. He'd almost made it look like the fish (especially the potato-scaled fillet in the center) was still swimming in the sea. From what she could see, he'd dotted the foam in strategic places on the plate, including near the ceviche, so one could take a bite with a plantain crisp and the foam, or try it plain.

So he closed his eyes and imagined Artimé, the way it had been, he way he wanted it to be again. His hands reached out to include the entire plot of land. "Imagine," he said in a soft voice, picturing it all, room by room, the lawn with the fountains, the trees, the creatures. When he was certain he'd imagined it, he want on. "Believe. " He believed with all his heart that Artimé could exist again. Believed that when he was finished with the spell and he opened his eyes, it would be there. "Whisper." Alex imagined Mr. Today whispering these words over the desolate plot of land so many years ago, calling it to live a new, vibrant life, and he realized that he'd been whispering the words all along. "Breathe." Alex took in a deep, satisfying breath and let it out slowly. He didn't forget it this time. He pictured himself breathing life into the world, giving it the air it needed to flourish once again. And then: "Commence." The command to make it all happen. The beginning of everything. [...] he remembered the clue. Utter in order, repeat times three. [...] When he finished the second round, he started one last time, his voice remaining soft. "Imagine. Believe. Whisper. Breathe." He hesitated, swallowing hard before the last one. And finally: "Commence." Nothing happened. All was deathly silent. Alex remained very still, eyes closed, arms outstretched, feeling a sort of calmness inside him that he hadn't felt ever before. It almost seemed like he was beginning to float, peacefully alone in the world. And then something did happen. The light through his closed lids grew pinkish-white, bright, and soon lights swirled around him, faster and faster, with colors joining in and growing stronger. He opened his eyes just as the land in front of him turned a luscious green and, with a great rumble, the enormous fountain broke through the ground, spewing up from the earth, the growing expanse of lawn rippling and resettling around it. The land spread farther, making Unwanteds along the shore lose their footing and tumble to the ground. Trees popped up to dot the lawn and for the jungle on the opposite side of Artimé. The gray shack spun and grew into the enormous mansion once again. The heat dissipated in an instant, and a cool breeze rushed in from the sea. Alex gaped. "I did it," he whispered. And then he yelled at the top of his voice, "I did it!

Sister, why do you think the stars in the sky don’t fall down?” Ye examined Feng. The kerosene lamp was a wonderful artist and created a classical painting with dignified colors and bright strokes: Feng had her coat draped over her shoulders, exposing her red belly-band, and a strong, graceful arm. The glow from the kerosene lamp painted her figure with vivid, warm colors, while the rest of the room dissolved into a gentle darkness. Close attention revealed a dim red glow, which didn’t come from the kerosene lamp, but the heating charcoal on the ground. The cold air outside sculpted beautiful ice patterns on the windowpanes with the room’s warm, humid air. “You’re afraid of the stars falling down?” Ye asked softly. Feng laughed and shook her head. “What’s there to be afraid of? They’re so tiny.” Ye did not give her the answer of an astrophysicist. She only said, “They’re very, very far away. They can’t fall.” Feng was satisfied with this answer, and went back to her needlework. But Ye could no longer be at peace. She put down her book and lay down on the warm surface of the kang, closing her eyes. In her imagination, the rest of the universe around their tiny cottage disappeared, just the way the kerosene lamp hid most of the room in darkness. Then she substituted the universe in Feng’s heart for the real one. The night sky was a black dome that was just large enough to cover the entirety of the world. The surface of the dome was inlaid with countless stars shining with a crystalline silver light, none of which was bigger than the mirror on the old wooden table next to the bed. The world was flat and extended very far in each direction, but ultimately there was an edge where it met the sky. The flat surface was covered with mountain ranges like the Greater Khingan Mountains, and with forests dotted with tiny villages, just like Qijiatun.… This toy-box-like universe comforted Ye, and gradually it shifted from her imagination into her dreams. In this tiny mountain hamlet deep in the Greater Khingan Mountains, something finally thawed in Ye Wenjie’s heart. In the frozen tundra of her soul, a tiny, clear lake of meltwater appeared.

For a long time, three dots in a row along the writing baseline designated something lost and unknown, then at some point also something unuttered and unutterable; no longer only something omitted or left out, but also something left open. Hence the three dots became a symbol that invites one to think the allusion to its conclusion, imagine that which is missing, a proxy for the inexpressible and the hushed-up, for the offensive and obscene, for the incriminating and speculative, for a particular version of the omitted: the truth.

Bran is sprawled across the couch, jeans traded for flannel pants, wearing the long-sleeved University of Miami T-shirt Mercedes bought him three years ago to replace the one she was wearing that accidentally got covered in meth. We have weird occupational hazards.

You may imagine her in the form of the Meditation on Parvati as the Yogini in figure 9, or follow the simple form that follows: Imagine Parvati as a young matron with skin the color of an apricot sunset or dawn sky. She has large breasts, long wavy hair, and dark eyes slanted upward. Between her eyebrows is a vermilion dot, and she has three horizontal white stripes of ash across her forehead. Her lips are red, and she wears several golden necklaces.

Clasping Kuntis hands in her thin, old, ivory-hued fingers, Gandhari whispered, Calm down, calm down, O Mother of the Pandavas! Calm down. Time moves in cycles, circling like the wheels of the chariot. Our life cycle is shrinking. Soon it will be just a dot. And finally even that dot will merge into the void. Yes, O Elder One, Don't blame yourself too harshly. No matter how hard you try, you can never bring back the past, never turn yesterday into tomorrow. See, today's sunrise was real, so was the sunset. We will fall asleep but time will keep moving. And tomorrow, it will give us yet another sunrise.

Captain, I’ve got something on the bow sonar!” said one of the techs, pulling Ziliani out of the memory. “It’s a nuclear turbine. Identifying now…Match. That’s the megafloat, sir. Distance to target: fifteen miles.” He snapped back to attention. He was in the command center and needed to give orders. “Maintain depth. Speed one-five knots.” The helm repeated his order, and then there was a brief sensation of deceleration. “Do we know where the Aegis defense ship is located?” “Gas turbine–engine signal at forty-three miles southwest of target…Match. JMSDF Nagato.” Ziliani stared at the two dots on the large display screen.

The Group Product Manager Role There's a role in larger product organizations that I find especially effective. The role is titled group product manager, usually referred to as GPM. The GPM is a hybrid role. Part individual contributor and part first‐level people manager. The idea is that the GPM is already a proven product manager (usually coming from a senior product manager title), and now the person is ready for more responsibility. There are generally two career paths for product managers. One is to stay as an individual contributor, which, if you're strong enough, can go all the way up to a principal product manager—a person who's an individual contributor but a rock‐star performer and willing and able to tackle the toughest product work. This is a very highly regarded role and generally compensated like a director or even VP. The other path is to move into functional management of the product managers (the most common title is director of product management) where some number of product managers (usually somewhere between 3 and 10) report directly to you. The director of product management is really responsible for two things. The first is ensuring his or her product managers are all strong and capable. The second is product vision and strategy and connecting the dots between the product work of the many teams. This is also referred to as holistic view of product. But lots of strong senior product managers are not sure about their preferred career path at this stage, and the GPM role is a great way to get a taste of both worlds. The GPM is the actual product manager for one product team, but in addition, she is responsible for the development and coaching of a small number of additional product managers (typically, one to three others). While the director of product management may have product managers who work across many different areas, the GPM model is designed to facilitate tightly coupled product teams.

She said she learned it in three weeks—but somebody else told me she really did it in two.” These feats are routine at Meadowmount, in part because the teachers take the idea of chunking to its extreme. Students scissor each measure of their sheet music into horizontal strips, which are stuffed into envelopes and pulled out in random order. They go on to break those strips into smaller fragments by altering rhythms. For instance, they will play a difficult passage in dotted rhythm (the horses' hooves sound—da-dum, da-dum). This technique forces the player to quickly link two of the notes in a series, then grants them a beat of rest before the next two-note link. The goal is always the same: to break a skill into its component pieces (circuits), memorize those pieces individually, then link them together in progressively larger groupings (new, interconnected circuits).

The book frames the topic for us; it puts the right question to us; it functions as the three dots that start us off … and we do the rest.

On my right, beyond the dark waters of the bay dotted with small craft, some anchored and some under way from one end of the harbor toward the other, the lights on the Balboa peninsula glittered like jewels. Not more than a hundred yards from me was a small sandy beach, a few feet beyond it the color and movement of the Balboa Fun Zone. Occasionally the sound of a merry-go-round there mingled raucously with the combo's more delicate harmonies, and lights from the Ferris wheel spun slowly over the amusement booths below it. As I passed the dance area, the music stopped. I walked to the portable bar farther back on the stern and asked the uniformed bartender for another bourbon highball. I got it, went back near the dancers and leaned against the rail, looking them over. The combo swung into Manhattan, and half a dozen couples started dancing.

We crossed through my favourite town yet, Ein Hod, made up entirely of creatives who had all been interviewed and selected to live there. Everything was a work of art in Ein Hod, from the drinking fountains to the benches and the street lamps; large sculptures dotted the pavements, and houses, converted to art studios, were open to the public.

Varied rhythms are useful for fast runs and passages. Diversifying the rhythms will help you keep your practicing engaged and focused while also enabling you to play evenly. There are many ways to vary rhythms. You can play dotted rhythms such as in Figure 1. You can also experiment playing the run in groups of three notes such as in Figure 2. For more diversification, play the run in groups of four notes, five notes, as well as in triplets as shown in Figure 3. Come up with new ways of varying the rhythms for your fast passages. Note that when you play a varied rhythm, you should also play the opposite varied rhythm immediately after. See A vs. B in the figures below.

Humans going into altered states of consciousness all react the same way, no matter where they come from. It is part of the way the human brain is wired. There are three stages of altered consciousness that have been recognised by laboratory experiment (Lewis-Williams & Dowson 1989: 60–67). In the first stage, people see zig-zags, dots and whorls. In the second stage this develops into a deeper trance experience, and the subjects see and feel a world more familiar to them, and can hear water, experience thirst, etc. The third stage is the deepest, and people in deep trance talk about entering a hole in the ground and seeing ‘real world’ imagery of animals and people. These different stages have been recognised in the rock art: stage one with grids, zig-zags, mesh shapes (such as nets); stage two with nested ‘U’ shapes and buzzing (interpreted as beehives); stage three with snakes coming out of the rock face, people with animal heads, etc. This last stage accompanies visual images of trancers in the dance, which include the ‘bent-over posture’ assumed by the shaman when dancing, and bleeding from the nose, which would occur when the shaman was physically under stress when entering the spirit world (Figure 4.4). Interviews with shamans have reported that at the moment of the climax, the power shoots up the spine and out of the top of the head. This, among the Ju/’hoansi Bushmen of Nyae Nyae, is called kia (Katz 1982), as we have seen in Chapter 3.

The park was dotted with small copses of trees, and I stopped before the first of these to look back. I picked out the princesses’ tower and gave it a silent farewell. I would miss Lily and Sophie, and I hoped they would be safe from whatever came. “I’m sorry I couldn’t protect you,” I whispered. At least they had their mother now—a far more fitting and satisfying companion than I had ever been. Max will look after them, I thought. Turning around, I urged Starfire forward. I needed clear eyes and a clear head if I was going to effect my own escape.

You can use a similar three-dot notation to call a function with an array of arguments. let numbers = [5, 1, 7]; console.log( max(... numbers)); // → 7 This “spreads” out the array into the function call, passing its elements as separate arguments. It is possible to include an array like that along with other arguments, as in max( 9, ... numbers, 2).

Dorothy Counts, wearing a new red-and-yellow dress made by her grandmother, with a long bow that flowed beyond her waist, waded into a sea of white rage. She was only fifteen years old, one of four black students chosen to integrate the schools in Charlotte. The other three didn’t face much resistance, because the White Citizens’ Council had chosen Harding as the place to make their stand. And stand they did. Dot Counts confronted a wave of hatred that morning, all captured by the camera of Don Sturkey, a photographer for The Charlotte Observer. As she walked toward the school, white students, their faces contorted with hatred and unmistakable glee, screamed, “Nigger go back home” and “Go back to Africa, burrhead!” They threw sticks and chunks of ice. They spat on her new dress. The police refused to protect her, staying at the other end of the street and watching the spectacle from a distance. No school officials or teachers were present to calm the crowd or escort Dorothy to class. Instead

Agatha: I… I didn’t realize there were other generals. Mamma Gkika: Ho! Hyu just met dose three old ogres on Castle Wulfenbach, yez? Iz a good thing dere’s more of us den dot. Dun vorry. Ven dis iz all calmed down, ve’ll make sure huy meet all of us. Agatha: … in the same room? At the same time? Mamma Gkika: Dun vorry. Just bring a big stick.

It can be useful for a function to accept any number of arguments. For example, Math.max computes the maximum of all the arguments it is given. To write such a function, you put three dots before the function’s last parameter, like this: function max(... numbers)

We were in the middle of a three car caravan accompanied by Jim Carlisle, a career diplomat and the perfect Charge’ de Affaires. His manner was formal but always with a practiced smile to make his counterparts feel at ease. He sat in the jump seat in front of Owen, Alex and I sat together in the back near the double cargo doors guarding the luggage. The driver was Pakistani as was the security guard on the passenger side. The cars were crossing a bridge when it happened. First the blinding flash, then the delayed sound, it was deafening with the unmistakable smell of high explosives. The Ford Expedition in front erupted in a mushroom cloud of smoke and fire as it leaped off the road and settled back in a black pile of melting plastic, glass and metal. Our driver slammed on the brakes, ramming the gear into reverse while twisting his body around for a better view out the rear door windows. It was to late, the car behind us had met the same fate, we were bookended by smoking heaps of scrap metal as the masked bombers, five of them, surrounded our SUV. This was a professional hit team, their leader was calm, he directed the others with chilling efficiency. They wore black ski masks, bullet proof vests and ear phone sets, only the leader spoke, the others took orders. The shortest one had a knapsack, he turned his back to another who unzipped it and removed the gray matter, it looked like putty, he slapped it hard against the double rear doors. These would be the most vulnerable, they locked together rather than to the structural integrity of the vehicle. Both doors exploded out and away from the car dangling precariously on their hinges. The short one jumped in first, throwing the luggage out and scrambling towards us as our security guard leveled his government issue Glock-45, he hesitated to long, the red dot sighting device from the backup shooter was in the center of his forehead. The bone and brain fragment from the melon sized exit wound in the back of his head splattered against the windshield. The driver went for the concealed weapon under the front seat but thought better of it as the bombers surrounded the vehicle. Outside the driver side window, the leader hit the bullet proof glass with the butt of his matt black automatic, he wanted the doors opened, the driver had already hit the lock release.

Excerpted From Chapter One “Rock of Ages” floated lightly down the first floor corridor of the Hollywood Hotel’s west wing. It was Sunday morning, and Hattie Mae couldn’t go to church because she had to work, so she praised the Lord in her own way, but she praised Him softly out of consideration for the “Do Not Disturb” placards hanging from the doors she passed with her wooden cart full of fresh linens and towels. Actually Sundays were Hattie Mae’s favorite of the six days she worked each week. For one thing, her shift ended at noon on Sundays. For another, this was the day Miss Lillian always left a “little something” in her room to thank Hattie Mae for such good maid service. Most of the hotel’s long-term guests left a little change for their room maids, but in Miss Lillian’s case, the tip was usually three crinkly new one dollar bills. It seemed like an awful lot of money to Hattie Mae, whose weekly pay was only nineteen dollars. Still, Miss Lillian Lawrence could afford to be generous because she was a famous actress in the movies. She was also, Hattie Mae thought, a very fine lady. When Hattie Mae reached the end of the corridor, she knocked quietly on Miss Lillian’s door. It was still too early for most guests to be out of their rooms, but Miss Lillian was always up with the sun, not like some lazy folks who laid around in their beds ‘til noon, often making Hattie Mae late for Sunday dinner because she couldn’t leave until all the rooms along her corridor were made up. After knocking twice, Hattie Mae tried Miss Lillian’s door. It opened, so after selecting the softest towels from the stacks on her cart, she walked in. With the curtains drawn the room was dark, but Hattie Mae didn’t stop to switch on the overheard light because her arms were full of towels. The maid’s eyes were on the chest of drawers to her right where Miss Lillian always left her tip, so she didn’t see the handbag on the floor just inside the door. Hattie Mae tripped over the bag and fell headlong to the floor, landing inches from the dead body of Lillian Lawrence. In the dim light Hattie Mae stared into a pale face with a gaping mouth and a trickle of blood from a small red dot above one vacant green eye. Hattie Mae screamed at the top of her lungs and kept on screaming.

The history of irregular media operations is complex and fractured; generalizations are difficult. Yet it is possible to isolate three large and overlapping historical phases: First, throughout the nineteenth century, irregular forces saw the state's telecommunications facilities as a target that could be physically attacked to weaken the armies and the authority of states and empires. Second, for most of the twentieth century after the world wars, irregulars slowly but successfully began using the mass media as a weapon. Telecommunications, and more specifically the press, were used to attack the moral support and cohesion of opposing political entities. Then, in the early part of the twenty-first century, a third phases began: irregular movements started using commoditized information technologies as an extended operating platform. The form and trajectory of the overarching information revolution, from the Industrial Revolution until today, historically benefited the nation-state and increased the power of regular armies. But this trend was reversed in the year 2000 when the New Economy's Dot-com bubble burst, an event that changed the face of the Web. What came thereafter, a second generation Internet, or "Web 2.0," does not favor the state, large firms, and big armies any more; instead the new Web, in an abstract but highly relevant way, resembles - and inadvertently mimics - the principles of subversion and irregular war. The unintended consequence for armed conflicts is that non-state insurgents benefit far more from the new media than do governments and counterinsurgents, a trend that is set to continue in the future.

In Logo, the child controls a little turtle on-screen, issuing it commands to make it move around. The turtle draws a line wherever it goes, so it’s kind of like using a computerized Etch A Sketch. To draw a square, a child would tell the turtle to go forward thirty steps, turn right ninety degrees, then do the same thing three more times. Children quickly got the hang of it, using Logo to write programs that would draw all manner of things, like houses or cars. They’d laboriously write one instruction for each step of the picture, almost the way you’d set up the dots for a connect-the-dots drawing. To draw a bird, they’d connect two quarter circles together.

first-ever professional check. For writing and performing a smash hit routine on a national coast-to-coast radio program, I received the magnificent sum of seven dollars and fifty cents, less seventy-five cents commission to the Thomas Lee Artists’ Bureau (Tommy was Don Lee’s son). The thrill of leaving on our trip around the world was dampened considerably when Harrison Holliway asked me to do the character on a weekly basis. I was heartbroken, but I had to tell him that we were leaving in five days. The continuation of the great career that had begun that Monday would have to wait until my return. •   •   • Just a few words about our trip, which lasted for six interesting and delightful months. The cost, for the three of us, was just under five thousand dollars. In 1934 the only way to cross an ocean was by ship, and the seas were dotted with literally hundreds of vessels carrying their passengers and cargo from one end of the world to the other. Many lines provided ships to service the large and profitable business of transporting people and things from place to place. The Dollar Line, the President Line, Matson, Canadian Pacific, British and Orient, and North German Lloyd were just a few of the many companies, each of which had as many as a ship a week visiting any given

Eventually, after you have planned the whole thing, you will have many, many steps, but they will be organized into a hierarchy of sorts, as shown in Figure5-1. In this drawing, the three dots represent places where other steps go, but we chose to leave them off so that the diagram can fit on the page. This type of design is a top-down design. The idea is that you start at the uppermost step of your design (in this case, “Build flying saucer”) and continue to break the steps into more and more detailed steps until you have something manageable. For many years, this was how computer programming was taught. Although this process works, people have found a slightly better way. First, before breaking the steps (which are the verbs), you divide the thing you’re building into parts (the nouns). In this case, you kind of do that already, in the first two steps. But instead of calling them steps, you can call them objects

Recognizing that non-dotted notes are divisible by two and that dotted notes are divisible by three is very important to understanding rhythm.

In response to current events, people often reach for historical analogies, and this occasion was no exception. The trick is to choose the right analogy. In August 2007, the analogies that came to mind—both inside and outside the Fed—were October 1987, when the Dow Jones industrial average had plummeted nearly 23 percent in a single day, and August 1998, when the Dow had fallen 11.5 percent over three days after Russia defaulted on its foreign debts. With help from the Fed, markets had rebounded each time with little evident damage to the economy. Not everyone viewed these interventions as successful, though. In fact, some viewed the Fed’s actions in the fall of 1998—three quarter-point reductions in the federal funds rate—as an overreaction that helped fuel the growing dot-com bubble. Others derided what they perceived to be a tendency of the Fed to respond too strongly to price declines in stocks and other financial assets, which they dubbed the “Greenspan put.” (A put is an options contract that protects the buyer against loss if the price of a stock or other security declines.) Newspaper opinion columns in August 2007 were rife with speculation that Helicopter Ben would provide a similar put soon. In arguing against Fed intervention, many commentators asserted that investors had grown complacent and needed to be taught a lesson. The cure to the current mess, this line of thinking went, was a repricing of risk, meaning a painful reduction in asset prices—from stocks to bonds to mortgage-linked securities. “Credit panics are never pretty, but their virtue is that they restore some fear and humility to the marketplace,” the Wall Street Journal had editorialized, in arguing for no rate cut at the August 7 FOMC meeting.

Something out there has a comm array that’ll put a dot the size of your anus on us from over three AU away,” Alex said. “Okay, wow, that’s impressive. What is our anus-sized dot saying?” Holden asked.

A coherent life is one lived in such a way that you can clearly connect the dots between three things: 1. Who you are 2. What you believe 3. What you are doing.

The proud little man was accompanied by three discreet touches of male vanity: a gold watch chain hanging from his dapper white waistcoat, a polka-dotted silk cravat held tightly to his high collar by a pearl stickpin, and his thirty-six-year-old wife.

Yeah, just what I needed, a massive three-day Hostess binge, followed by a week of trying to replicate recipes so that if no one decides to buy and reissue Twinkies and Suzy Q's, I'll be all set. It was a ridiculous endeavor, since most of the experience of Hostess is in the slightly plasticky tastes and textures, which cannot be replicated in a home kitchen. You can make a delicious moist yellow cake and fill it with a marshmallowy vanilla cream, and it will be spectacular, trust me; I ate at least a dozen. But it won't taste like a Twinkie. The cake won't have the springiness, the filling won't have the fluff, and it is impossible to get those three little dots in the bottom. Which would be fine, since I hadn't actually eaten a Hostess product for the better part of a decade, hadn't missed them either. But that little news item hit, and in a Pavlovian fit of nostalgia, I was off to the local gas station to load up on white boxes with blue and red details. Twinkies, Sno Balls, Ding Dongs... even a cherry Fruit Pie. All of them the flavors of my youth, and proof that there are certain things you should leave as fond memories, since they don't really hold up.

Bindu is used to describe the most insignificant geometrical object, a single point or a circle shrunk down to its centre where it has no finite extent. Literally, it signifies just a 'point', but it symbolises the essence of the Universe before it materialized into the solid world of appearances that we experience. It represents the uncreated Universe from which all things can be created. This creative potential was revealed by means of a simple analogy. For, by its motion, a single dot can generate lines, by whose motion can be generated planes, by whose motion can be generated all of three-dimensional space around us. The bindu was the Nothing from which everything could flow.

On our return from the bush, we went straight back to work at the zoo. A huge tree behind the Irwin family home had been hit by lightning some years previously, and a tangle of dead limbs was in danger of crashing down on the house. Steve thought it would be best to take the dead tree down. I tried to lend a hand. Steve’s mother could not watch as he scrambled up the tree. He had no harness, just his hat and a chainsaw. The tree was sixty feet tall. Steve looked like a little dot way up in the air, swinging through the tree limbs with an orangutan’s ease, working the chainsaw. Then it was my turn. After he pruned off all the limbs, the last task was to fell the massive trunk. Steve climbed down, secured a rope two-thirds of the way up the tree, and tied the other end to the bull bar of his Ute. My job was to drive the Ute. “You’re going to have to pull it down in just the right direction,” he said, chopping the air with his palm. He studied the angle of the tree and where it might fall. Steve cut the base of the tree. As the chainsaw snarled, Steve yelled, “Now!” I put the truck in reverse, slipped the clutch, and went backward at a forty-five-degree angle as hard as I could. With a groan and a tremendous crash, the tree hit the ground. We celebrated, whooping and hollering. Steve cut the downed timber into lengths and I stacked it. The whole project took us all day. By late in the afternoon, my back ached from stacking tree limbs and logs. As the long shadows crossed the yard, Steve said four words very uncharacteristic of him: “Let’s take a break.” I wondered what was up. We sat under a big fig tree in the yard with a cool drink. We were both covered in little flecks of wood, leaves, and bark. Steve’s hair was unkempt, a couple of his shirt buttons were missing, and his shorts were torn. I thought he was the best-looking man I had ever seen in my life. “I am not even going to walk for the next three days,” I said, laughing. Steve turned to me. He was quiet for a moment. “So, do you want to get married?” Casual, matter-of-fact. I nearly dropped the glass I was holding. I had twigs in my hair an dirt caked on the side of my face. I’d taken off my hat, and I could feel my hair sticking to the sides of my head. My first thought was what a mess I must look. My second, third, and fourth thoughts were lists of every excuse in the world why I couldn’t marry Steve Irwin. I could not possibly leave my job, my house, my wildlife work, my family, my friends, my pets--everything I had worked so hard for back in Oregon. He never looked concerned. He simply held my gaze. As all these things flashed through my mind, a little voice from somewhere above me spoke. “Yes, I’d love to.” With those four words my life changed forever.

That’s when they saw-- SPOOK NUMBER THREE! WH-O-O-O WH-O-O-O-O As the campers and Pa shivered and shook, Sis opened an eye and took a good look. She saw something strange: a yellow hat on a pumpkin head, Pa’s red pajamas and a polka-dot dress that looked exactly like…MAMA’S! “Just having fun!” The voice--it was Mama’s. Then her head poked out of Papa’s pajamas. “Teaching Papa a lesson like this was just too good a chance to miss!” “It’s a double ghost lesson,” said Jane with a grin. “There are no such things! There never have been! “But just as sure as night follows day-- it’s fun to be scared of them anyway!

Global finance made so much hay, not through efficient markets but by riding up and down three interlinked giant global asset bubbles using huge amounts of leverage. The first bubble began in US equities in 1987 and ran, with a dip in the dot-com era, until 2007. It was the longest equity bull market in history, and it spread out from the United States to boost stock markets all over the world. The smart cash that was being made in those equity markets looked around for a hedge and found real estate, which began its own global bubble phase in 1997 and ran until the crisis hit in 2006. The final bubble occurred in commodities, which rose sharply in 2005 and 2006, long before anyone had heard the words “quantitative easing,” and which burst quickly since these were comparatively tiny markets, too small to sustain such volumes of liquidity all hunting either safety or yield. The popping of these interlinked bubbles combined with losses in the subprime sector of the mortgage derivatives market to trigger the current crisis.

Outside the airport, the caravan waited. Four silver Airstream trailers, three trucks, two parking violations and Aunt Dot. Stepping into the parking lot felt like coming home.

We clattered into the streets of Remalna under a brilliant sky. The cobblestones were washed clean, the roofs of the houses steamed gently. A glorious day, which should have brought everyone out not just for market but to talk and walk and enjoy the clear air and sunshine. But every window was shuttered, and we rode alone along the main streets. I sensed eyes on us from behind the barriers of curtain, shutter, and door, and my hand drifted near the saddle-sword that I still carried, poor as that might serve as a weapon against whatever awaited us. And yet nothing halted our progress, not even when we reached the gates of Athanarel. It was Vidanric who spotted the reason why. I blinked, suddenly aware of a weird singing in my ears, and shook my head, wishing I’d had more sleep. Vidanric edged his mount near mine. He lifted his chin and glanced up at the wall. My gaze followed his, and a pang of shock went through me when I saw the white statues of guards standing as stiff as stone in the place where living beings ought to be. We rode through the gates and the singing in my ears intensified, a high, weird note. The edges of my vision scintillated with rainbow sparks and glitters, and I kept trying--unsuccessfully--to blink it away. Athanarel was utterly still. It was like a winter’s day, only there was no snow, just the bright glitter overlaying the quiet greenery and water, for even the fountains had stopped. Here and there more of the sinister white statues dotted the scene, people frozen midstride, or seated, or reaching to touch a door. A danger sense, more profound than any I had yet felt, gripped me. Beside me Vidanric rode with wary tension in his countenance, his gaze everywhere, watching, assessing. We progressed into the great courtyard before the Royal Hall. The huge carved doors stood wide open, the liveried servants who tended them frozen and white. We slowed our mounts and stopped at the terraced steps. Vidanric’s face was grim as he dismounted. In silence we walked up the steps. I glanced at the door attendant, at her frozen white gaze focused beyond me, and shuddered. Inside, the Throne Room was empty save for three or four white statues. No, not empty. As we walked further inside, the sun-dazzle diminished, and in the slanting rays of the west windows we saw the throne, its highlights firelined in gold and crimson. Seated on it, dressed entirely in black, golden hair lit like a halo round his head, was Flauvic. He smiled gently. “What took you so long, my dear cousin Vidanric?” he said.

When the day came for me to leave, I sat on my front step with three suitcases, two boxes, and a teddy bear, the grand total of everything I owned. Neither of my parents was home.

John Battelle: With the benefit of hindsight, Google’s IPO in 2004 was as important as the Netscape IPO in 1995. Everyone got excited about the internet in the late nineties, but the truth was a very small percentage of the world used it. Google went public after the dot-com crash and reestablished the web as a medium. Web 1.0 was a low-bandwidth, underdeveloped toy. Web 2.0 is a robust broadband medium with three billion people using it for everything from conducting business to communicating with your friends and family.

Isn’t today your birthday? Sloane nodded. She could feel a smile forming. Is it so simple? she thought. For someone to say it’s your birthday, and your guard falls. Like you are seven years old, wearing your new dotted swiss dress.

I reached for the two beefsteak tomatoes in the grocery bag. The shade of their skins bore a hint of orange, indicating the firmness of the juicy flesh within. My sharp blade sliced into the fruit: dripping, sticky, dotted with the jeweled seeds inside. I cut the flesh into tiny cubes as the scent of sunshine and vines filled the air. I transferred the tomatoes to a ceramic bowl before rinsing the board and knife clean. Using the flat side of the blade, I smashed three cloves of garlic. The fragrant aroma teased my nostrils as I rolled a fat red onion onto the board. The papery amaranthine skin crinkled under my fingertips. According to Ma-ma, the red onion contained too much chi, the reason it caused so many tears. She compared the red onion to Younger Shen- rich in color and bold in flavor. I never questioned her logic, for no other onion induced the same reaction.

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Things accumulated in purses. Unless they were deliberately unloaded and all contents examined for utility occasionally, one could find oneself transporting around in one’s daily life three lipstick cases each with just a crumb of lipstick left, an old eyebrow pencil sharpener without a blade, pieces of defunct watch, odd earrings, handkerchiefs (three crumpled, one uncrumpled), two grubby powder puffs, bent hairpins, patterns of ribbon to be matched, a cigarette lighter without fuel (and two with fuel), a spark plug, some papers of Bex and a sprinkling of loose white aspirin, eleven train tickets (the return half of which had not been given up), four tram tickets, cinema and theatre stubs, seven`pence three farthings in loose change and the manda-tory throat lozenge stuck to the lining. At least, those had been the extra contents of Phryne’s bag the last time Dot had turned it out. The

   "Okay!...my three dots! have people ever reproached me for them! they've slobbered on about my three dots!...'Ah! his three dots!...Ah, his three dots!...He can't finish his sentences!' Every stupidity in the book! every one, Colonel!"    "So?"    "Go!pss!pss!...piss off, Colonel! and what's your opinion, Colonel?"    "Instead of those three dots, you might just as well put in a few words, that's what I feel!"   

CLEAR THINKERS REQUIRED Tom Donohue, president and CEO of the three-million-member-strong U.S. Chamber of Commerce, organizes very popular small dinners and invites a wide variety of guests. The express purpose is the exchange of ideas. Tom brings together twenty titans of industry and empowers each with just one minute to talk on a key issue. Then Tom makes his summation. He connects all the dots in a masterful fashion, tying together what everyone has said. Chamber board member Barry Appleton says, “It is this distilled knowledge of clear and concise thinking that is the magic that keeps everyone coming back for more.

It is pretty clear, then, that attention can control the brain’s sensory processing. But it can do something else, too, something that we only hinted at in our discussion of neuroplasticity. It is a commonplace observation that our perceptions and actions do not take place in a vacuum. Rather, they occur on a stage set that has been concocted from the furniture of our minds. If your mind has been primed with the theory of pointillism (the use of tiny dots of primary colors to generate secondary colors), then you will see a Seurat painting in a very different way than if you are ignorant of his technique. Yet the photons of light reflecting off the Seurat and impinging on your retina, there to be conveyed as electrical impulses into your visual cortex, are identical to the photons striking the retina of a less knowledgeable viewer, as well as of one whose mind is distracted. The three viewers “see” very different paintings. Information reaches the brain from the outside world, yes—but in “an ever-changing context of internal representations,” as Mike Merzenich put it. Mental states matter. Every stimulus from the world outside impinges on a consciousness that is predisposed to accept it, or to ignore it. We can therefore go further: not only do mental states matter to the physical activity of the brain, but they can contribute to the final perception even more powerfully than the stimulus itself. Neuroscientists are (sometimes reluctantly) admitting mental states into their models for a simple reason: the induction of cortical plasticity discussed in the previous chapters is no more the simple and direct product of particular cortical stimuli than the perception of the Seurat painting is unequivocally determined by the objective pattern of photons emitted from its oil colors: quite the contrary.

I also write the x and other symbols inside the event box when appropriate. (For example, if an event gets rescheduled, I draw the migration symbol in the box. If the event is canceled, I put a slash in the box.) And when writing about big moments in my diary section, I use the event box, and then color the box in with one of three markers, depending on what kind of event it was.

You tend to think that you are mainly the big blotches on the canvas: the big splashes that you want to draw attention to (you're aiming for the Olympics one day, you're into drag racing, you're working for a luxury company in Paris, so on and so forth). But those big blotches that you want to draw attention to aren't you, at the end of the day. At the end of the day, you are the tiny dots that you've pulled together, the small dots on your canvas which you've pulled together that make up the fundamental person that you are: the way you put a flower on your slice of cake, the way you mop your floor three times because once isn't good enough, the way that you nurture another person who is growing on the same path you have already been through, so on and so forth. You are the accumulation of the attention that you put into your daily, mundane actions which lend life to your existence. Or character to your daily life. That is you. That is what you have to give. That is your energy. Your big blotches have no power if your little dots are not accounted for.

The rate at which we can adapt is increasing,” said Teller. “A thousand years ago, it probably would have taken two or three generations to adapt to something new.” By 1900, the time it took to adapt got down to one generation. “We might be so adaptable now,” said Teller, “that it only takes ten to fifteen years to get used to something new.” Alas, though, that may not be good enough. Today, said Teller, the accelerating speed of scientific and technological innovations (and, I would add, new ideas, such as gay marriage) can outpace the capacity of the average human being and our societal structures to adapt and absorb them. With that thought in mind, Teller added one more thing to the graph—a big dot. He drew that dot on the rapidly sloping technology curve just above the place where it intersected with the adaptability line. He labeled it: “We are here.” The graph, as redrawn for this book, can be seen on the next page. That dot, Teller explained, illustrates an important fact: even though human beings and societies have steadily adapted to change, on average, the rate of technological change is now accelerating so fast that it has risen above the average rate at which most people can absorb all these changes. Many of us cannot keep pace anymore.

Once we start to read the book, the benefit to our own train of thought continues. We’re used to imagining that it’s the ideas explicitly stated in a book that will enrich us, but we may not need the full thoughts of another person to come to a better sense of what we ourselves believe. Often, just a few paragraphs or even parts of sentences can be sufficient to provoke our minds and can nudge us to stop, daydream and reach for a notebook in which we jot down not the thought that we’ve read but the thought that it prompted inside us, which might be quite different and more significant. The book frames the topic for us; it puts the right question to us; it functions as the three dots that start us off … and we do the rest.

It is easy enough to make a plan of life of which the background is black, as the pessimists do; and then admit a speck or two of star-dust more or less accidental, or at least in the literal sense insignificant. And it is easy enough to make another plan on white paper, as the Christian Scientists do, and explain or explain away somehow such dots or smudges as may be difficult to deny. Lastly it is easiest of all perhaps, to say as the dualists do, that life is like a chess-board in which the two are equal, and can as truly be said to consist of white squares on a black board or of black squares on a white board. But every man feels in his heart that none of these three paper plans is like life; that none of these worlds is one in which he can live. Something tells him that the ultimate idea of a world is not bad or even neutral; staring at the sky or the grass or the truths of mathematics or even a new-laid egg, he has a vague feeling like the shadow of that saying of the great Christian philosopher, St. Thomas Aquinas, 'Every existence, as such, is good.' On the other hand, something else tells him that it is unmanly and debased and even diseased to minimise evil to a dot or even a blot. He realises that optimism is morbid. It is if possible even more morbid than pessimism. These vague but healthy feelings, if he followed them out, would result in the idea that evil is in some way an exception but an enormous exception; and ultimately that evil is an invasion or yet more truly a rebellion. He does not think that everything is right or that every thing is wrong, or that everything is equally right and wrong. But he does think that right has a right to be right and therefore a right to be there, and wrong has no right to be wrong and therefore no right to be there.

She gazed up at the brick building’s three-storey facade. A large bell tower fronted one corner adding another, smaller floor to the building and dotting it with high, arched windows, while a miniature version of the same tower could be found at the rear of the building. Somewhere asymmetrically between the two, was an ambitious front entrance – a rather garish but commanding limestone archway that appeared as though it was about to take flight.

Or to put it another way: when that which the proposition asserts is also the case. According to the first two propositions of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: 1 The world is all that is the case. 1:1 The world is the totality of facts, not of things. THE BARBER AND WHAT IS WRONG with a proposition like “There are three dots in the world”? Russell may have asked in that hotel room, waving the sheet of paper in his hand. Well, as proposition 1:1 of the book establishes, “the world” (as a whole) is not itself a fact but only “the totality of facts.” One chief reason that Wittgenstein denied that propositions about the world could be meaningful lies in the following logic: If the world were itself a fact, it would—as only one fact among others—effectively include itself as a fact. It would be, as a world, on the one hand defined as a set of certain elements (here: the totality of facts) and at the same time an element of that set (hence: a fact). But a logical formalism that allows a set to contain itself as an element, leads—as none other than Russell himself had proved, Wittgenstein believed—to infernal logical complexities and, finally, to uncontrollable contradictions.

Badi soch, kadi mehnat, pakka iraada.’ (Big vision, hard work and determination) If you have these three qualities, you can do anything.” Housekeeping still forms the bulk of BVG’s

The photos showed a light-complexioned black man with cornrows, a prison tattoo around his neck—ragged dashes and a caption that said, “Fill to dotted line”—and three or four facial scars, along with a nasty jagged scar on his scalp. A photo taken from his right side demonstrated the effects of being shot in the ear with a handgun with no medical insurance. Some intern had sewn him up and sent him on his way, and now his ear looked like a pork rind.

Business might seem riskier than a stable job. But let’s not forget that most of these jobs led precisely Nowhere. An increment every three years, a promotion every decade. That was not good enough

And then he noticed the flowers, dotting the breast of every man, woman, and child in Rebel Red. Pink corsages. Corsages like the ones that had been waiting for them at the hotel. In the crowds, on the home team sideline, on the overlay of every Pride of the South band member, and on the chest of every burly Ole Miss player. Each had the same pink corsage.  Their prom dates had arrived.

A morning later, Nancy described her first dream, the first remembered dream of her life. She and Judy Thorne were on a screened porch, catching ladybugs. Judy caught one with one spot on its back and showed it to Nancy. Nancy caught one with two spots and showed it to Judy. Then Judy caught one with three spots and Nancy one with four. Because (the child explained) the dots showed how old the ladybugs were. She told this dream to her mother, who had her repeat it to her father at breakfast. Piet was moved, beholding his daughter launched intoanother dimension of life. Like school. He was touched by her tiny stock of imagery the screened porch (neither they nor the Thornes had one; who?), the ladybugs (with turtles the most toylike of creatures), the mysterious power of numbers, that generates space and time. Piet saw down a long amplifying corridor of her dreams, and wanted to hear her tell them, to grow older with her, to shelter her forever.” John Updike, Couples, 1968.

Do you know that two is an untouchable number too?” Finn said after several long minutes, his eyes on his hand. “It is?” He nodded slowly and traced the dots which now numbered six. “And six is what is known as a perfect number. The sum of its divisors—one, two, and three—all add up to six. The product of its divisors are also six.” “So what you’re telling me, then, is together we are perfect and untouchable?

A Typical Description of an NDE (Near Death Experience) I asked Ring to describe for me a typical NDE. He told me: The first thing is a tremendous feeling of peace, like nothing else you have experienced. Most people say like never before and never again. People say [that it is] the peace that passes all understanding. Then there is the sense of bodily separation and sometimes the sense of actually being out of the body. There are studies that show that people can sometimes report veridically what is in their physical environment, e.g., the lint on the light fixtures above themselves. They could see in a three-hundred-sixty-degree panoramic vision. They had extraordinary acuity. Often when they went further into the experience, they went to a dark place that is sometimes described as a tunnel, but not always. They usually feel that there is a sense of motion; that they are moving through something that is vast almost beyond imagination. And yet they feel they don't have the freedom to go anywhere. They feel as if they were being propelled. The extreme sense of motion often seems to be one of acceleration. Some describe that they have felt as if they were moving a the speed of light or faster. One NDEr described this as superluminal-moving beyond the speed of light with tremendous accelerated motion through a kind of cylindrical vortex, and then, in the distance, the person describes a dot of light that suddenly grows larger, more brilliant, and all encompassing. Ring continued: At this stage of the experience there is an encounter with light. It seems to be a living light exuding pure love, complete acceptance, and total understanding. The individual feels that he is made of that light, that he has always been there, and that he has stepped out of time and stepped into eternity. This feeling is accompanied by a sense of absolute perfection. Being out of time introduces another aspect of the experience: a sense of destiny. Ring explained: Then there is a panoramic light review in which you see everything that has ever happened to you in your life. Not [only] just what you have done but the effects of your actions on others, the effects of your thoughts on others. The whole thing is laid out for you without being judged but with a complete understanding of why things were the way they were in your life. The best metaphor I can suggest for this is: as if you were the character in someone else's novel. There would be one moment outside of time where you would have the perspective of the author of that novel, and you have a sense of omniscience about that character. Why he did the things that he did, why he had affected others, and so on. It is a profound moment outside of time when this realization occurs. You see the whole raison d'etre of your life. You may also see scenes or fragments of scenes of your life if you choose to go back to your body. In other words, it is not only that you have flashbacks but you also seem to have flash-forwards of events that will occur almost at though there is a kind of blueprint for your life. And it is up to you at that moment. You have free choice because it is often left to you whether to go back to your life or to leave it behind. The people we talk with of course always make the choice to go back or sometimes are sent back.

ship. 3) The signal SOS was chosen as an international distress call because of the simplicity of the three letters in Morse code: three dots, three dashes, and three dots. 4)

The only nonhumanoid scientist present at the Blue Table, astrophysicist Se’al Cethente Qas was also the one that Dakal found the most disquieting—though not for the reasons some of the crew seemed to be reacting to Dr. Ree or the other nonhumanoids aboard Titan, none of whom bothered Dakal at all. What troubled him was the fact that Dr. Cethente looked suspiciously like a lamp that had once belonged to Dakal’s paternal grandmother back on Prime. Cethente was a Syrath, whose exoskeletal body had the same fluted quality that was prevalent in Cardassian design. The astrophysicist was shaped, in fact, a great deal like a three-dimensional sculpture of the symbol of the Union: a high dome on top, tapering downward almost to a point before bottoming out in a diamond formation that Dakal knew was the Syrath secondary sense cluster. Like the primary cluster that was the dome, the diamond was dotted with bioluminescent bulges, glowing with the telltale green light of its senses at work, soaking up information about its environment omnidirectionally. Four slender, intricately jointed arachnid legs extended in four directions from the body’s narrowest point, giving Cethente a solid footing on the deck, while an equal number of tentacles emerged at need from equidistant apertures just under the dome. In repose, and with its tentacles retracted, Cethente seemed quite the inanimate object. But to Dakal, the doctor looked so much like the lamp in his grandmother’s dwelling—and which had so consistently unnerved him as a child—that after first being introduced to it, Dakal briefly suspected the Federation of having sent a Syrath operative to spy on his grandmother.

During the winter students researched the colors of the plants, berries, and flowers at different seasons of the year, creating a chart that wrapped high around three walls of the classroom showing with dots the color of each plant species in the park throughout the year.

Where were you on the night of March 7?" Typical detective stuff you hear on television all the time. It's so phony. I hate it. Most people can't remember where they were three nights ago much less on a particular date. I know I can't. The times you remember are the ones you're supposed to: Christmas Day, the Fourth of July, your birthday. As you get older and occasionally look back, even those days drift together into one small blob of memories. But you always remember the first time and the last. You remember your first day of school and the last. You remember the first time you went to the show by yourself and the last time you saw your grandfather. The first time you made love. Most of the nights of my life have passed by barely noticed, like the black squares of rosary beads slipping through the wrinkled fingers in the last pew. But later, when I've looked back, I've realized that a few ink colored seeds have taken root in my mind and have grown into oaken strength. My dreams drift back and nestle in their branches. If those nights were suddenly not to be, I, who had come to lean on them, to relish those few surviving leaves of a young autumn that has passed and will not come again, would not know where I'd been. And I'd wonder, even more so, if there was anywhere to go. Every Chicago winter delivers four gray weeks, with rare spots of sunshine that are apparently the flipside of hell. Teeth bared, the wind comes snarling off the lake with every intention of shredding the skin off your face. Numb since November, hands can no longer tell or care if they are wearing gloves. Snowmen, offsprings of childhood enthusiasm, are rarely born during these weeks. Along with the human spirit, the temperature continues to plummet. The ground is smothered by aging layers of ice and snow. Looking at a magazine ad, you see a vaguely familiar blanket of green. Squinting back through months of brown snow, salt-marked shoes, running noses, icy railings, slippery sidewalks, and smoking sewers, you try to recall the feeling of grass. February is four weeks of hanging onto the ropes, waiting to be saved from a knockout by the bell of spring. One year, I was invited to Engrim University's President's Ball, which was to be held on the first Saturday in February. I don't know why I was invited. Most of the students who received invitations were involved in a number of extracurricular activities; they participated in student government, belonged to various clubs, were presidents of fraternities or sororities, were doing extremely well academically or were, in some other way, pleasing the gods. I was never late with my tuition payments. Maybe that was it. Regardless, the President's Ball was to be held in the main ballroom of one of Chicago's swankiest hotels. I thought it was an excellent opportunity to impress Sarah with my importance. A light snowfall was dotting the night air when

Most of us have to make some trade-offs and compromises along the way, including some we may not like. If your Lifeview is that art is the only thing worth pursuing, and your Workview tells you that it’s critical to make enough money so your kids have everything they need, you are going to make a compromise in your Lifeview while your children are dependent and at home. But that will be okay, because it’s a conscious decision, which allows you to stay “on course” and coherent. Living coherently doesn’t mean everything is in perfect order all the time. It simply means you are living in alignment with your values and have not sacrificed your integrity along the way. When you have a good compass guiding you, you have the power to cut these kinds of deals with yourself. If you can see the connections between who you are, what you believe, and what you are doing, you will know when you are on course, when there is tension, when there might need to be some careful compromises, and when you are in need of a major course correction. Our experience with our students has shown that the ability to connect these three dots increases your sense of self, and that helps you create more meaning in your life and have greater satisfaction.

She glanced down at the triangle of three dots tattooed on the fleshy web between her index finger and thumb. The day she got jumped into Ninth Street, Veto had tattooed the dots into her skin using ink and a pin. Later, he had tattooed the teardrop under her right eye when she got out of Youth Authority Camp. The second teardrop was for her second stay in Youth Authority. She would have gone back a third time for firing a gun, if a lenient judge hadn't sentenced her to do community service work instead. She had fired the gun in frustration when she couldn't stop her homegirls from doing a throw-down. The cops had caught her, but she wouldn't turn rata. She was willing to go back to camp to protect her homegirls. That was the code. But the judge had seen something different in her eyes this time and let her off with community service. Jimena had known about her destiny by then, and she had changed. It amazed her even now, if she thought about it. Who would have thought she was meant for something so important?

How to Ask Alexa for Basic Calculations “Alexa, one thousand eight hundred seventy six (1,876) divided by four” “Alexa, three point four eight six (3.486) times twenty four” “Alexa, convert 12 feet to centimeters” “Alexa, convert 7 tablespoons to milliliters” “Alexa, convert 35 Fahrenheit to Celsius” “Alexa, how many miles are in thirty kilometers?” How

Here’s the scene: The three of us are by the Olympic-sized pool. The Latina with the thick waist is hovering in the shade of the veranda up by the house, her eyes on Frank in case he might want something, but so far he doesn’t and he hasn’t offered anything to me. If he did, I would ask for sunblock because standing here next to his pool is like standing on the sun side of Mercury. Gotta be ninety-six and climbing. Behind us is a pool house larger than my home, and through the sliding glass doors I can see a pool table, wet bar, and paintings of vaqueros in the Mexican highlands. It is air-conditioned in there, but apparently Frank would rather sit out here in the nuclear heat. Statues of lions dot the landscape, as motionless as Joe Pike, who has not moved once in the three minutes that I have been there. Pike is wearing a gray sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off, faded Levi’s, and flat black pilot’s glasses, which is the way he dresses every day of his life. His dark brown hair is cut short, and bright red arrows were tattooed on the outside of his deltoids long before tattoos were au courant. Watching Joe stand there, he reminds me of the world’s largest two-legged pit bull.

Along with John and Judi, we took a big risk and started filming on the movie before we had a contract signed with MGM. There didn’t seem to be any choice. I imagined all the insurance underwriters across the world reacting to the phrase “live crocodiles.” Those two words would be enough to blow them right out of their cubicles. So we began shooting with our zoo crocodiles, but without signatures on the dotted line for the movie. A particular scene in the script--and a good example of an insurance man’s nightmare--had a crocodile trying to lunge into a boat. Only Steve’s expertise could make this happen, since the action called for Steve and me to be in the boat at the time. If the lunging crocodile happened to hook his head over the edge of the boat, he would tip us both into the water. That would be a one-way trip. “How are you going to work it?” I asked Steve. “Get the crocs accustomed to the dinghy first,” he said. “Then I’ll see if I can get them interacting with me while I’m in the boat.” First he tried Agro, one of our biggest male crocs. Agro was too wary of the boat. He’s a smart crocodile. I think he remembered back when he was captured. He didn’t want any of it. We decided to try with our friend Charlie. Charlie had been very close to ending up at a farm, his skin turned into boots, bags, and belts. He definitely had attitude. He spent a lot of his time trying to kill everything within range. Steve felt good about the possibility of Charlie having a go. Because he was filming a movie and not shooting a documentary, John had a more complex setup than usual, utilizing three thirty-five-millimeter cameras. Each one would film in staggered succession, so that the film magazine changes would never happen all at once. There would never be a time when film was not rolling. We couldn’t very well ask a crocodile to wait while a fresh mag was loaded into a camera. “You need to be careful to stay out of Charlie’s line of sight,” Steve said to me. “I want Charlie focusing only on me. If he changes focus and starts attacking you, it’s going to be too difficult for me to control the situation.” Right. Steve got no argument from me. Getting anywhere near those bone-crushing jaws was the furthest thing from my mind. I wasn’t keen on being down on the water with a huge saltwater crocodile trying to get me. I would have to totally rely on Steve to keep me safe.

From the age of six I had a mania for drawing the shape of things. When I was fifty I had published a universe of drawings. But all I have done before the age of seventy is not worth bothering with. At seventy three I have learned something of the pattern of nature, of animals, of plants, of trees, birds, fish and insects. When I am eighty you will see real progress. At ninety I will have cut my way deeply into the mystery of life itself. At one hundred, I will be a marvellous artist. At one hundred and ten, everything I create - a dot, a line - will come alive. I call on those who still may be alive to see if I keep my word. Signed: The Old Man Mad About Art.

Life is hard in the days, but in the decades, the creator surges ahead from connecting the dots. Three decades of research by Korn Ferry7 shows that learning agility is the single-best predictor of career success, not grades or college pedigrees.

There are at least three ways in which bubbles can be useful. First, the bubble may facilitate innovation and encourage more people to become entrepreneurs, which ultimately feeds into future economic growth.9 Second, the new technology developed by bubble companies may help stimulate future innovations, and bubble companies may themselves use the technology developed during the bubble to move into a different industry. Third, bubbles may provide capital for technological projects that would not be financed to the same extent in a fully efficient financial market. Many historical bubbles have been associated with transformative technologies, such as railways, bicycles, automobiles, fibre optics and the Internet. William Janeway, who was a highly successful venture capitalist during the Dot-Com Bubble, argues that several economically beneficial technologies would not have been developed without the assistance of bubbles.10

the morning of April 1, 1882, our Circle Dot herd started on its long tramp to the Blackfoot Agency in Montana. With six men on each side, and the herd strung out for three quarters of a mile, it could only be compared to some mythical serpent or Chinese dragon, as it moved forward on its sinuous, snail-like course. Two riders, known as point men, rode out and well back from the lead cattle, and by riding forward and closing in as occasion required, directed the course of the herd. The main body of the herd trailed along behind the leaders like an army in loose marching order, guarded by outriders, known as swing men, who rode well out from the advancing column, warding off range cattle and seeing that none of the herd wandered away or dropped out. There was no driving to do; the cattle moved of their own free will as in ordinary travel.

did, it hit me. It just hit me. It felt like someone had slammed a plank of wood into the side of my head. I couldn’t breathe or think straight. I couldn’t make my hands work to call room service. I had lost everything and I knew that I was entirely, completely to blame. I knew that I had hurt the woman I loved more than anything in the world. I know you tried to tell me this, tried to tell me what I was doing to you, to us and our family. I used to watch your mouth move, saying the words, but hear nothing. In the darkness of my silent hotel room I finally heard you. I got it and it shattered me. I didn’t move for three days after that until security came to check on me. I lay in the bed and I relived every moment of pain I caused you and the kids. I forced myself to remember each incident, each fucking time I hurt you. And while I was doing that I saw the awful parallel with my father and my childhood. I knew the psychology behind it because I’m not an idiot, but I had never connected the dots of my own abuse with those of me when I was the abuser. In my head the reasons for my behaviour had always been justified. It was ridiculous that I couldn’t explain away my father’s abuse but I could explain away my own.

Next, wearing a dark-green dress with white polka dots, Michael’s mother, Ethel, entered the room. As she reached the chair, she turned and embraced the matron, who choked up and left the room. The guards dropped the leather mask over her face. The first of the three standard shocks was applied at 8:11. “She seemed to fight death,” The New York Times reported. “She strained hard against the straps and her neck turned red. A thin column of grayish smoke rose from the upper side of her head. Her hands, lying limp, were now clenched like a fighter’s.” After the standard three shocks of electricity, one short and two long, doctors approached to check her heartbeat and discovered that Ethel was still alive. Her straps were readjusted and a fourth shock was applied. Once more, she strained against the straps. A fifth current was required before the doctors pronounced her dead.

People think they know about misfortune and bad luck. But there was being unlucky-like when you tripped over your shoelaces or dropped a five-dollar bill in the subway or ran into your ex when you were wearing three-day-old sweatpants--then there was the kind of bad luck that Orquídea had. Bad luck woven into the birthmarks that dotted her shoulders and chest like constellations. Bad luck that felt like the petty vengeance of a long-forgotten god.

I go into the depths of the shed, where the keel curves down to the pointed prow, and there it is, the pencil drawing I made when I was four, the three of us in an upside-down boat surrounded by moons and stars. I'm wearing my favourite red-and-white polka dot dress. Dad calls it my cave painting, created in a distant past, at the very birth of the world. I coloured it in with crayons and it was very bright, almost luminous. I trace it with my fingers. I brush away some dust. Each year it's there, but each year a little more dull, more faded. How old will I be when at last it’s gone?

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four foot ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores at the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.